art

On the intersection of science and art, the NY Times profiles former astronaut Alan Bean, who for nearly thirty years has painted what he experienced in spaceflight:

Critical attention has eluded Mr. Bean, 77, though he has developed, largely through word of mouth, a following among private collectors who pay up to $175,000 for one of his works. In July, the Smithsonian Air and Space Museum in Washington will mount a show of 45 of his works and will release a book of reproductions of his paintings. He has high hopes that the 40th anniversary of the moon landing may lure critics to take a look at his work.

I'm used to drawing and painting an entirely different kind of lifeless body. But the Moon poses unique challenges:

“People talk about nature being beautiful, and it is, but it’s not harmonized like a painting,” he said. “If Monet painted what he saw, we wouldn’t celebrate him today. He painted a little of what he saw but then he painted mostly the way he felt about it.”

Yet Mr. Bean’s methods still reflect his scientific side. He builds a scale model of every scene he paints, and uses a klieg light to simulate the sun and to get the shadows right. He works out the angle of the light and the positions of the people with mathematical precision. He wants the details to be historically correct.

The story doesn't cover the artistic side of NASA, and thereby may leave the impression that Bean is more of an anomaly than he really is. An immense attention to scientific illustration accompanied the development of the space program, as photorealistic renderings of space (and very early on, animated computer graphics) were an important part of spreading the science to the public. Bean's approach is, of course, very different and helps to extend the tradition outside the technical aspects into the humanistic sphere.

The Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge UK, is putting on an exhibition titled, "Endless Forms: Darwin, Natural Science and the Visual Arts."

The exhibition is accompanied by a well-produced webiste, which includes descriptions of the collection, some material for educators (including visit information for the UK), and a virtual exhibition. Some of the text may be stretching Darwin's direct influence on the arts -- a naturalistic eye goes back farther than Audubon, for example, but several sections are interesting. Here's an excerpt from "Darwin and the Impressionists":

Edgar Degas, too, is known to have engaged directly with Darwinian theory, especially through reading Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals soon after it was published in French in 1874. His images of dancers, singers, and criminals in the decades that followed stressed a kinship with animals in their features and gestures, and hinted at the possibility of human degeneration to an animal condition.

I think it's an open question how much Darwinism really affected popular culture. Several of the artists represented (e.g., Robert Farren) were already representing ancient creatures well before the publication of the Origin. Artists seem to have reacted to a greater understanding of nature, and science drew on that art as well as upon itself.

(via Jeff Hayes)

UPDATE (2009/06/23): I should mention that the BBC has a slideshow based on the exhibition. It doesn't have as much material, but it does have nice big versions of some of the included artwork. Plus, kinda depressing classical music.

On the occasion of the Lucy exhibit going to New York, Donald McNeil, Jr., profiles artist and reconstructor Viktor Deak. Deak's 78-foot mural of human evolution is part of the exhibit.

The article gives a nice short picture of Deak, what it takes to be trained as a paleo artist (hint: lots of anatomy), and his working environment. Deak's website has photos of a lot of his work. I especially like the way McNeil's article describes the artist-scientist interaction:

Picasso never had to explain that his mistresses weren’t actually cubic, but Mr. Deak has taken grief over as little as a flexed knee. One academic critic who saw his Lucy mural publicly boasted that he himself “had the good fortune to examine Lucy when she was in Donald C. Johanson’s lab in Cleveland, and I can assure you that the anatomy of the lower back, hips, feet and knee and ankle joints all provide clear evidence that those early hominids stood just as erect as we do.”

Mr. Deak replied on the same Web site that he knew perfectly well that Lucy could stand up, but he had depicted her crouching because she was pulling away from a predator — the viewer. She was, he explained, protecting the baby in her arms and about to run off.

I just think that's classic. The scientist (and you know you can guess who) wants an iconography. The specimen is its features, and the artistic representation should lay those features out for the viewer. It's like having all the stigmata in the right places on a crucifix -- the wounds tell the story. The artist, on the other hand, wants to express the individual beyond the features, a story to be conveyed by posture and gesture. It's a conflict -- with many stories to tell, only a few can make it into a museum display.

I don't have much value to add to the "figurative art" angle to the Hohle Fels Venus figurine. It seems very interesting that there is a concentration of carved iconic figures in the Swabian Aurignacian. That has two elements -- first, the concentration itself; second, the focus on carved ivory. Other regional Upper Paleolithic variants have their own concentrations of unique artifacts, sometimes tools (like the Solutrean leaf point) other times found objects (like the fossil shells in the Belgian and German Magdalenian. And we know that other times and places in the Upper Paleolithic have carved objects, so here we have the combination of both, in a very early Upper Paleolithic culture.

I do think it's worth discussing the date of the figurine a little more closely. Conard's paper includes a nice short discussion of the difficulties of establishing an accurate chronology -- a bunch of dates are available spanning much of the sequence, and there is substantial mixing of older and younger dates across the sequence.

There is no simple explanation for the variable radiocarbon dates from Hohle Fels and Geienklösterle. The noisy signals result from a combination of factors including variable sample preparation, variable levels of atmospheric carbon, taphonomic mixing and excavation error. Given the lack of reproducibility within and between radiocarbon laboratories, I prefer to emphasize the stratigraphic context of the finds, and to use the highly variable radiometric dates as rough indicators of age8. Although there is no generally accepted calibration for radiocarbon dates over 30 kyr bp, preliminary calibrations suggest that dates of 32 kyr bp correspond to roughly 36 kyr bp in calendar years. If the early dates are correct, the Venus would be even older. The fact that the Venus is overlain by five Aurignacian horizons, containing a dozen stratigraphically intact anthropogenic features with a total thickness of 1 m, suggests that the figurine is of an age corresponding to the start of the Aurignacian, around 40,000 calendar years ago.

The paper also includes a very nice picture showing the stratigraphy profile of the site in terms of artifact positions, color-coded by level. The Venus does lie beneath a well-stratified Aurignacian, with a depth of in this area of more than a half meter, although I am also impressed by the overlying meter of "Gravettian-Aurignacian transition." Conard's text is slightly more definitive than the figure, since two of the five "overlying" Aurignacian layers are not represented directly above the artifact, and one appears mostly to underlie it.

The research report is accompanied by a perspective piece by Paul Mellars. He frames the importance of the site by referring to its early date:

Fragments of the figure were excavated from archaeological deposits in the Hohle Fels cave in south Germany, dated by a range of more than 30 radiocarbon measurements to at least 35,000 years in age (in terms of the newly 'calibrated' radiocarbon timescale) (Mellars 2009:176).

This is a tricky statement to parse. Conard provides eight radiocarbon dates for objects in the lowest Aurignacian level (Vb) at Hohle Fels, only two of these are older than 35,000 radiocarbon years. Mellars refers to calibrated dates, not radiocarbon dates. On that basis, the statement is likely correct but a little misleading in comparison with later, Gravettian-associated figurines, whose dates are reported in uncalibrated years.

For those not familiar with the arcana of radiocarbon dating, the atmospheric proportion of carbon-14 varied during the last 40,000 years, so that there was actually more or less of it at some times than others. For the oldest radiocarbon dates, up above 25,000 BP, the age reported in half-lifes is systematically younger than the real age of an object in calendar years (given in "years ago" or some such). Over the span above 30,000 years ago, the difference is up to 5000 years or more -- so that a radiocarbon date of 30,000 BP might correspond to a calendar date older than 35,000 years ago.

This creates the potential for much confusion when describing dates. In this case, what does it mean to see that a Venus figurine from the Aurignacian is "more than 35,000 years old" when other figurines from the Gravettian date to "25,000 BP"? There's a 5000-year gap between those two timescales -- one that amounts to a sixth of the total age of an artifact. And when we read that an object is "more than 35,000 years old" and remember that Neandertals lived up to "29,000 BP" it is very easy to forget that these dates may well be synchronous. So we have to continually remind ourselves to use comparable timescales when talking about objects in the Upper Paleolithic.

I've discussed the problems with radiocarbon calibration at some length, in association with some earlier work by Mellars. Sometimes I find that reading and learning more about a subject actually clarifies matters a bit. In the case of radiocarbon chronology, it seems that the more I learn, the more confused things really are.

Given the error associated with calibration and atmospheric variation, it is no surprise (as Conard reports in the paper) that the radiocarbon dates in a site over around 30,000 BP should be somewhat mixed and confused. The problem is not so much that ten objects from the same moment will have different proportions of carbon-14, it is that ten objects from different times may have the same proportion. So it is especially important to understand the stratigraphy of a site completely. This appears to be a good, conservative example, and it will be interesting to see what happens if the excavation progresses further into the deeper underlying Mousterian.

But meanwhile there are other sites, excavated in a range of circumstances, in which the stratigraphy was not so carefully documented, or may have been more mixed. I suspect we'll be hearing more confusion before we get a lot more clarification.

References:

Mellars P. 2009. Origins of the female image. Nature 459:176-177. doi:10.1038/459176a

Conard NJ. 2009. A female figurine from the basal Aurignacian of Hohle Fels Cave in southwestern Germany. Nature 459:248-252. doi:10.1038/nature07995