Senses of Science

Four months ago I wrote a post about wonder in an attempt to sketch out the aspirational mood of this blog (or at least my sense of it). In six week increments since I’ve metaphorically returned to that mood and tried to make its implications more concrete by mapping out the actual directions that thinking about wonder and new lines of disciplinary mingling have led my own research: first, into the domain of science film, and second, into postulations about this genre within a critical category I called ‘the impossible image.’

So come December, I’ve decided to take the opportunity for reflection provided by the end of a calendar year and circle back to wonder, backlit by a sense of some things I’ve learned from this multi-directional conversation thus far. The hero of this post is an out-and-out iconoclast: the scientist and Surrealist filmmaker Jean Painlevé, whose six-decade career was devoted to the intertwining of science and art on every level. A biologist trained in the Laboratoire d’Anatomie et d’Histologie Comparée at the Sorbonne, Painlevé was an avant-garde photographer and filmmaker who penned countless texts, reviews, polemics, and manifestos; was politically active during and beyond the Second World War; and initiated a scientific film institute dedicated to supporting and disseminating science film well before the nexus of art and science was comprehended as a serious topic.

underwater bricolage: Jean Painlevé with his diving gear
"Everything is the center of the world. I'm forced to be multicentric."

Best of all, Painlevé is a humorist. His mesmerizing films and delicate photographs, chatty texts and sparking interviews give us a way to concretize a subtle quality of the aesthetics of wonder—the significance of pleasure in the strangeness and surprising beauty of the natural world. The mood of his contribution to the history of our topic seems to me perfectly encapsulated in Foucault's riff on discovery and the affects of wonder:

Curiosity is a vice that has been stigmatized in turn by Christianity, by philosophy, and even by a certain conception of science. Curiosity is seen as futility. However, I like the word; it suggests something quite different to me. It evokes "care"; it evokes the care one takes of what exists and what might exist; a sharpened sense of reality, but one that is never immobilized before it; a readiness to find what surrounds us strange and odd; a certain determination to throw off familiar ways of thought and to look at the same things in a different way; a passion for seizing what is happening now and what is disappearing; a lack of respect for the traditional hierarchies of what is important and fundamental.

 

Poetrees

This is something I saw on the internet that was kind of nice. It seems that the Scottish Poetry Library in Edinburgh is haunted by a mysterious artist. The artist takes books (not library books, thankfully!), turns them into sculptures and then surreptitiously places them in the library. A more thorough story on the sculptor is here (though not the identity).

Chris Scott/flickr

The library itself named the first work, a poetree... so don't blame me for the title of the post. The image above is a movie theatre with the characters leaping out of the screen and challenging the audience (a different angle below).

Chris Scott/flickr

There are lots of other equally nice sculptures, such as the original poetree, as well as a pleasant detective mystery to go with the missing identity of the surreptitious sculpture. All can be seen at the news article, so why not go read it?

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