Situated Aesthetics: Art Beyond the Skin is the fruit of a workshop held in Milan in September 2009. The workshop brought together cognitive and neuroscientists, artists, philosophers, and others interested in expanding beyond the reductionistic, brain-focused approach that predominated in early art and the brain publications. Divided into three parts, the book first examines research that situates externalism within aesthetics in general.  A second section then examines externalism in relation to different artistic forms.  The third part explores the concept through specific artworks.

While collections of this sort frequently feel as if they were pieced together, all of the Situated Aesthetics papers are quite strong. Moreover, and to the credit of the contributors, the book carries the give-and-take of workshop conversations into the published papers.  Thus, there is a real sense of an engagement among the authors as they present their ideas. Riccardo Manzotti, the editor, begins with an overview of the papers and the current externalist approaches in neuroscience, cognitive science, and philosophy of mind. Here he nicely summarizes the ideas of earlier authors and convincingly explains why adding externalism to the equation is important. In his words:

“By and large, externalism is the view that the external world is relevant and indeed constitutive of the subject, which is more extended than the body. In particular, externalism is taken as the view that the physical underpinnings of the mind are spatio-temporally more extended than the neural activity inside the nervous system.  For the purposes of this volume, the key is the fact that a shift in the subject’s ontology will inevitably have repercussions for any theory of aesthetics.” (p. 3)

As someone who often finds art and the brain research too narrowly based, I was glad to see that the volume includes visual art, music, text-based views ,and even work that fits within an art/sci/tech framework.  (For example, Stéphane Dumas looks at contemporary artists and theories in terms of biotechnologies.) This range reminds the reader that there are commonalities among the arts and nuances particular to specific media.  The comprehensive approach is even evident within the articles.  Not only do some authors refer to other articles in the book; at times writers offer more than one perspective on a topic.   While these papers do not explicitly address the early reductionistic way of placing art in the spiritual realm, their efforts to recognize the systemic qualities that are a part of art making and art appreciation will no doubt help us to further move beyond the framework that either relegated art to the spiritual realm or inadequately spoke about cognitive functions, environmental influences, and experiential/experimental aspects of all art forms.

For example, Joel Krueger and Liliana Albertazzi both connect art with extended space.  Krueger’s essay, “Enacting Musical Content,” presents music as an active skill that involves a physical interaction with the space where the music is heard and performed.  This includes an investigation of how sensorimotor regularities grant perceptual access to music qua music.  In other words, he argues that music is more than just sound. Thus, musical expression requires some attention to the music qua music, an approach that looks beyond “mere sounds.” Presenting such an approach, Krueger defends the ideas that music manifests experientially as having spatial content and presents the holistic component of the externalistic view.

Albertazzi, who writes from a visual art and pictorial representation perspective, focuses on the structure and nature of extended space. She sees “extended space” as a structure of our aesthetic experience and of the perceived physical world. Thus, for Albertazzi, the extended space is neither a purely phenomenological description of the lived nor a merely physical notion, but rather a concept we can use as an explicative bridge between externalist and internalist views.  Her view offers a path beyond the self-referential and an approach that allows for artistic expression as well as the audience’s aesthetic experience.

“Externalism, Mind, and Art” by Erik Myin and Johan Veldeman and “Art and Extensionism“ by Robert Pepperell are also compelling articles. As his title suggests, Pepperell uses the term extensionism to stress the extended dimensions of objects and events rather than the distinctions between them. Applying this approach to the analysis of art reveals the widely distributed nature of artworks and the mental qualities they convey. Pepperell explains concerns that are not brain-centric and his view is a fertile argument for the analysis of art as extended into the environment.

By contrast, Myin and Veldeman emphasize the importance of the externalist approach more generally. They first analyze the pros and cons of active and exploratory externalism in their analysis of cognitive mental processes.  Then, they apply their ideas to contemporary art and aesthetic experience.  Compiling complicated ideas in this quite readable essay both challenges the contextualist’s claim about the existence of an anti-aesthetic art and also includes an analysis of useful work that is (overly) focused on the brain. Their conclusion, that contemporary artworks challenge the assumption that our visual response to visual artwork is “purely” phenomenal, is convincing, as is their argument that the activity of looking at artworks serves many purposes.

It is noteworthy that Imprint Academic, the publisher of this refreshing volume, also initiated several of the early art and the brain discussions.  Their 1999 issue on “Art and the Brain” (a volume of the Journal of Consciousness Studies) presented the now classic articles on the subject by V. J. Ramachandran and Semir Zeki. When the editors invited commentary of the scientific articles, it was clear from the varied reactions that implicit tenets of the scientists were not shared by all with an interest in a systemic approach to art and the brain.  Imprint Academic has since published a number of special issues probing art, aesthetics, and other related topics.  Extending the discussion has helped the field grow significantly.  To oversimplify how the trajectory has changed and matured, while many argued that the early work of Ramachandran and Zeki neglected artistic process and the realms outside of brain activity, Situated Aesthetics shows that the artists, theorists, and scientists are clearly intent on filling in some of the early lacunae within the field. Not only does this volume expand the dialogue, it also feels much more contemporary than the early papers, which seemed out of touch with today’s art world and the experimental media that has transformed the way artists work.

Finally, the book states that the workshop showed there is common ground for future research activities. These authors show both that there is a broadly based constituency for using cognitive and neural inspired techniques and that the domain of art extends way beyond the limited brain approach. No doubt the ideas presented by these authors will help art historians, museum curators, art archiving, art preservation, scientists, and philosophers. The volume also shows bridges are developing across disciplines. Now cognitive scientists and neuroscientists appear open to using art as a special way of accessing the structures of the mind, artists and theorists add cultural/experiential concerns to the equation; and there are also artists who explicitly draw inspiration from current research on various aspects of the mind.  This book, which is substantive and yet easy to read, has whetted my appetite.  I look forward to seeing how the methodological paradigm that emerged from this workshop takes form once these ideas become a part of the broader conversation.

Reference:

[1] Imprint Academic’s three publications on Art and the Brain and their other art related special issues are available at http://www.imprint.co.uk/.

Situated Aesthetics: Art Beyond the Skin

by Riccardo Manzotti
Imprint Academic, Exeter, UK, 2011
250 pp. Paper, £17.95
ISBN: 9-781845-402389.

Reviewed by Amy Ione
Director, The Diatrope Institute
Berkeley, CA 94704, USA

ione@diatrope.com

EBOS 2011 is presented by ProArts Gallery in Oakland, CA.  This review was prepared for Leonardo Reviews .

After reviewing the 7^th Creativity and Cognition Conference [1], held in Berkeley in 2009, two thoughts kept reverberating in my mind as time passed.  First, I thought about the many reviews I have written about art and events in the Bay Area and wondered why I have never looked at the vibrant art produced here.  I also thought quite a bit about Cathy Treadaway’s paper, mentioned in that review, in which she outlined her approach to integrating newer technologies into her handcrafted art. To put these thoughts to rest, I decided to review the annual East Bay Pro Arts Exhibition (EBOS) in the Bay Area this year.  This 2-weekend event highlights the work of over 400 artists located in the San Francisco Bay Area, many of whom open their studios to the public.  While perhaps not as well known outside of the Bay Area as other locally-based projects such as Burning Man, which has achieved global recognition, EBOS does offer a noteworthy mix of innovative art, groundbreaking museum and gallery exhibitions, live concerts, and great food.

The focal point of the show is the ProArts gallery in downtown Oakland, where each artist can include a small example of his or her work.  The resulting collage is remarkably strong and immediately highlights the talent in the community.  Perhaps the most creative contribution was one that showed the degree to which art, science, and technology is now a normal part of any exhibition space.  In this case, Raines Cohen mounted a large postcard for the exhibition inside a locked box.  Just before the opening reception, he unlocked the box and placed an iPad inside that was running a video presentation of his work and photographs throughout the opening reception.  At this point it became clear that the postcard was a clever placeholder, and the purpose of the locked box was to use it for the video invitation that he ran during the opening, which was intended to entice people to visit his space. [I assume that the postcard was returned to the locked box after the opening reception.]

The purpose of the ProArts gallery space is to help art enthusiasts devise their visitation plan.  I must admit that although I mapped out a plan from the gallery presentation, once I got going, I found it hard to stay on track.  I was lured into spaces by posters on the street and comments from artists I met as I visited with them in their studios and other visitors I encountered along the way. I am not sure if I recommend this approach because I missed studios of interest based on their gallery pieces.  Still, I was glad I took advantage of those who tried to draw an audience to their space because I found some gems this way.

The first day of the four-day event I traveled around with a colleague.  We picked as one of our first stops a building where several prominent Bay Area artists (Richard Diebenkorn, Elmer Bischoff, William Theophilus Brown, and Paul Wonner) had had their studios there in the 1950s.  Together with David Park, who had a studio in downtown Berkeley, Bischoff and Diebenkorn founded the Bay Area Figurative style. Moreover, it was in this space, in the mid-1950s, that Diebenkorn created his famous ”Berkeley Series” of abstract landscapes in this space.

As it turned out, one of the particularly robust studios I visited, Marty McCutcheon’s, is now located in this building.  McCutcheon’s space was set up to be a gallery exhibition of his work and was one of the high points of the day.  The studio consisted of a large sculpture/installation around the walls that was uniformly whitewashed (though with bits of unpainted colors showing through).  The all-white installation was put together with found and discarded objects (a chair, a television, old paint brushes, etc.) constructed in a flattened format resembling a synthetic cubist painting.  While my companion saw shades of Diebenkorn in the asymmetrical geometry (suggesting some resonance with where the studio space was located), I thought more about Louise Nevelson’s unique assemblages made from cast-off wood and other materials that she, too, transformed into works of art. Like Nevelson’s work, I think the monochromatic color added a mysterious quality that made the work alluring.  The installation also incorporated a video projection that complemented the assemblage and truly elevated the presentation because in the video McCutcheon showed his hands drawing and working.  These clips, which were pieced together, were even more fascinating once I realized that I could see him create some of the whited out pages of text that were a part of the assemblage.  This juxtaposition brought the work of William Kentridge to mind, whose creative practice includes drawing a bit, shooting the drawing, and then drawing and shooting some more.

At first I was surprised that McCucheon’s space was set up to highlight his work and that the “working studio” aspect of his area was so invisible.  But, as it turned out, many of the folks I visited did not highlight their working space. This was a bit disappointing.  For example, there were many locations where artists grouped together to increase foot traffic, one of the largest being at a former Barnes and Noble space that was transformed into an art fair, with 43 artists displaying their work.  This was a mixed bag.  In some ways the setup made the “studio” aspect of Open Studio seemed quite remote.  Yet, I did find both intriguing work and many artists who integrated art, science, and technology themes into their projects.

Maryly Snow, for example, brought to mind that while digital art is still a relatively recent phenomenon, artists have used art, science and technology for a long time in various forms (e.g., printmaking and photography).  She was quite representative of the way artists now mix and match, often using printmaking as a technique to create works that offer a commentary on scientific and mathematical ideas.  Briefly, she works with “appropriated” images, finding ways to reassemble them and make them her own.  She had several bubble chamber images on display.  Her web page says these are from the Lawrence Berkeley Labs.  She also showed her Art for Physicists portfolio and photocollages, which are quite unlike those of David Hockney.  Whereas he keeps the multiple pieces in the presentation, Snow assembles the collage with tape and then rephotographs it so that it becomes “whole” again.

Of the places I visited, I thought Benny Alba’s studio/gallery was perhaps the best mix in terms of combining a number of artists with a “studio” feel.  Benny greets visitors as they walk in, making you feel like a guest in her home.  The studio itself, with 11 artists inside, felt quite cohesive and had the kind of community feel that was missing at the Barnes and Noble site.   The work of Vicky Mei Chen, a printmaker, stood out.  She produced small, hand-made artist books (in slipcases) exploring the relationship between urban landscape and the entities that occupy the space. Another artist of note here was Jennifer Downey, a painter whose work centers on nature and how humans interact with nature.

Although I found that traveling to so many studios has its ups and downs, the ups are more prevalent than the downs.  There are also both rewards and challenges.  Visiting one multiple space environment, with a maze-like interior, was annoying because it was surprisingly difficult to find the artists that I wanted to see.  Thinking about it later, this layout probably offered the artists who worked there more privacy.  Cluttered locations showed “the artist” more but, in some case, this meant there was not enough room for visitors (because the space was so taken up by the art). It is harder to visit artists who work in spaces that are not shared with others.  [Of those I visited I particularly liked Barbara Maricle’s, who displayed some mixed media prints that included old architectural blueprints and other materials.]

One of the fun things about this type of event is that going here and there exposes things that are ordinarily invisible.  Ironically, one building with an open studio introduced me to an exciting work that was just “sitting there” in the lobby.  Called “The Tule Wave,” the piece is a large-scale kinetic sculpture by Berkeley-born Reuben Margolin. It consists of a small electric motor located overhead that rotates a pulley, which in turn imparts movement to 241 Dacron strings. The strings then pass through brass grommets in a tension grid and descend to support 1140 sections of Tule Reed and more than 3000 brass beads.  I urge readers to visit “http://www.reubenmargolin.com/waves/Tule/” for an image of the piece and more information about how it was made. Installed at the David Brower Center in Berkeley in 2010, it is in a location I walk by daily. Yet, I had never been inside and had no idea that this extraordinary artwork was housed there.  With so much attention given to museums, exhibitions and art-designated spaces, I wonder how many similar gems we miss as we live our lives.  In this case, I find it hard to describe the dynamic and overall presence of this hanging work.

While I found the organization of the ProArts event extraordinary overall, there were a few things that were less successful in my view. The website itself is a valuable tool in planning one’s itinerary, so I can understand why many of the artists decided to display multiple images, but several of these links were broken. I also would have liked an option to save my itinerary in the online gallery.

Still, all in all, East Bay Pro Arts Open Studio confirmed my sense that art, science, and technology is quite evident across the board these days. This event, which mixes well-established masters with younger artists, highlighted many aspects of creativity and also allowed many artists to show what goes on inside their working space. It was particularly in the studios of the artists who are using what are often considered more traditional tools that I realized (from conversations and their libraries) that creative people have a knack for integrating the old and the new.

[1] Leonardo Reviews: posted December 2009 http://www.leonardo.info/reviews/dec2009/everydaycreativity.ione.php

Source: East Bay Open Studios Preview Exhibition and East Bay Open Studios 2011
Reviewed by Amy Ione

The interdisciplinary journal “Fragmenta” welcomes contributions to the theme Art and Knowledge in Italy and the European Republic of Letters, 1500-1750. The volume explores the ways in which knowledge was shaped and shared among painters, architects, collectors and scientists. It brings to the fore the epistemological dimensions of the making, trading, collecting and discussion of artworks. The city of Rome, debating ground for the key artistic and scientific issues of the Early Modern period, and perennial fulcrum of European antiquarianism and the academic approach of art, functions as the backdrop for a range of topics with a wide geographical spread.

The editors especially encourage a transnational perspective. How and why were artists and architects involved in the knowledge networks of the Republic of Letters, and how does this international dimension modify older historiographical differentiations?

Possible topics include:

● artists’ and collectors’ writings;

● images and material objects included in correspondence;

● scientific publications and “paper museums” involving international collectives of artists (e.g., Dutch and French engravers working in Rome);

● the interrelations between artists, artisans and scientists in the production of scientific instruments and encyclopaedic collecting;

● the role of material objects in the shaping and circulation of antiquarian scholarship;

● notions of virtuosity and connoisseurship;

● the role of the visual arts in communicating technical and theological knowledge to the non-Western world (and knowledge about the colonies and missions to Europe).

Fragmenta, published by Brepols, is a peer-reviewed interdisciplinary journal available in print and online, focusing on history, art history and archaeology. Recent thematic issues have discussed Early Modern subjectivity (forthcoming) and archaeology and national identity (2008). It is edited by the staff of the Royal Netherlands Institute in Rome. Guest editor for this volume is Thijs Weststeijn.

Contributors are invited to send a one-page abstract to: thijs.weststeijn@uva.nl before September 30th, 2011.

URL: http://www.knir.it/images/stories/CFP_FRAGMENTA.doc.pdf

A Women’s Berlin: Building the Modern City
by Despina Stratigakos
Reviewed by Zainub Verjee

Contemporary Art in Eastern Europe
by Nikos Kotsopoulos, Editor
Reviewed by Florence Martellini

Grafik Dynamo
by Kate Armstrong and Michael Tippett, with essay by Joseph Tabbi
Reviewed by Dene Grigar

Lab Coats in Hollywood: Science, Scientists and Cinema
by David A. Kirby
and
From IBM to MGM: Cinema at the Dawn of the Digital Age
by Andrew Utterson
Reviewed by Mike Leggett

Le Sel de la Semaine: Henry Miller
by Fernand Seguin
and
Poison Woman: Figuring Female Transgression in Modern Japanese Culture
by Christine L. Marran
and
The Rule of Mars: Readings on the Origins. History and Impact of Patriarchy
by Cristina Biaggi, Editor
Reviewed by Jonathan Zilberg

Making Art History: A Changing Discipline and Its Institutions
by Elizabeth C. Mansfield, Editor
Reviewed by Jonathan Zilberg

Theories of International Politics and Zombies
by Daniel W. Drezner
Reviewed by Anna B.Creagh

Water, Place, & Equity
by John M. Whiteley, Helen Ingram & Richard Warren Perry, Editors
Reviewed by Zainub Verjee

Zones of Re-membering: Time, Memory, and (un)Consciousness
by Don Gifford; D. E. Morse, Editor
Reviewed by Rob Harle

Perpetual Inventory by Rosalind E. Krauss is a collection of essays that span three decades. The title comes from Krauss’ view that her job as an art critic requires that she take a perpetual inventory of what artists make and do, constantly revising her ideas about the direction and significance of the work she writes about. I am not sure the book successfully showcases this effort, however.

In her introduction, for example, Krauss writes that this anthology considers what she calls the post-medium condition. She says that while Jean-François Lyotard argued that the postmodern condition is characterized by the end of a ‘master narrative,’ Krauss see in the post-medium condition of contemporary art a similar coherence. She writes:

“For the most part, Perpetual Inventory charts my conviction as a critic that the abandonment of the specific medium spells the death of serious art . . . the artists I observed persevering in the service of a medium had abandoned traditional supports in favor of strange new apparatuses . . . calling such things ‘technical supports’ would, I thought, allay the confusion of the use of ‘medium,’ too ideologically associated as the term is with outmoded tradition.”

In other words, since contemporary artists are often not medium specific, looking at art practices requires a broader framework than the traditional medium specific approaches of painting, sculpture, or whatever. As she puts in her essay “A View of Modernism,” first published in Artforum 11 (September 1972):

“[M]oderist critics appear to have cut themselves off from what is most energetic and felt in contemporary sculpture. Their inability to deal with Richard Serra, or Michael Heizer, or Keith Sonnier, or Robert Smithson is anomalous in the extreme. Further, these critics have continually balked at admitting film to the status of a “modernist art.” Given the quality of recent advanced film, this position is simply no longer admissible even for critics who confine themselves to dealing just with painting and sculpture, for film as a medium has become increasingly important to sculptors themselves; Serra and Sonnier are only the most obvious examples. (p. 126)

As I read Perpetual Inventory I found the recent essays significantly more enticing than many of the older ones, particularly her discussions of William Kentridge’s exploration of cinematic animation and Christian Marclay’s “Lip Sync: Marclay Not Nauman.” The “Lip Sync” article, first published in October, no. 116 (Spring 2006) focuses on Christian Marclay’s Video Quartet (2002), an extraordinary work comprised of a sampling of more than 700 Hollywood films that draw the viewer in immediately. To my mind, lip-syncing isn’t really the focus of Marclay’s work, which edits segments of films together using movements and sound to create tantalizing connections. Krauss’ point is that Marclay’s efforts build on a history. How earlier filmmakers tried to sync sound with lip movement is well known. More recently, Bruce Nauman classic piece Lip Sync (1969) alluded to this technological development in terms of video. Nauman held the camera upside down and focused in a close-up of the his mouth with his lips and tongue articulating the words “lip sync” as the audio track shifts in and out of sync with the video. Marclay’s statement, by way of contrast, offers more of an insinuation of synchronization than an articulation of it, developed through using hands on keyboards, men and women singing, dancing and noises to create the visual and sonic collage that unfolds on four projection-screens.

Krauss suggests that Marclay’s sense of synchronicity, which we feel more than perceive, is an expression of how an artist today blends tools and styles. Her larger point is that contemporary artworks are layered mechanisms that show a unitary organization of an unfolding narrative. Those who know this work would understand that it feels like a unified piece despite the layers of its complexity. As is often the case with Krauss’ essays, I’m not sure that her commentary on Video Quartet will translate as effectively to a reader who is unfamiliar with the artwork.

The Lip Sync essay also shows that Krauss, too, has a talent for layering. For instance, this article references the use of grids in modernist painting, Nauman’s Lip Sync, how Nauman both paid homage to the challenge early filmmakers faced in their efforts to synchronize sound with silent films and more. Reading thorough the article I couldn’t help but think how fascinating synchronization is. Cable television today offers a good case in point, for the problem of synchronization periodically comes up due to the large amounts of video signal processing.

“‘The Rock’: William Kentridge’s Drawings For Projection,” originally published in October, no. 92 (Spring 2000) is the most compelling essay in the book. William Kentridge is a South African artist whose animated films pursue the problems of apartheid. It is in this essay that Krauss come closest to articulating the idea of technical support because Kentridge’s work mixes film, drawing, erasure and highly charged ideas. Indeed, Kentridge is a good example of how the narrative of a product is not simply what a work is “about.” With Kentridge, Krauss shows how an artist speaks through the activity of creation and, in doing so, uses a language of a different quality than the narrative associated with the work. Kentridge’s term for this is fortuna, a word that is intended to explain how the technical aspects of his process open onto the conceptual. For him, fortuna is like improvisation. He compares it to speaking, pointing out that it is through the very activity of speaking, generated by the act itself, that new connections and thoughts emerge. Because Krauss’ definition of technical support is broad enough to include fortuna, Kentridge is a particularly good showcase for her ideas. “Stalking the drawing,” is another Kentridge device Kraus mentions to explain how the combination of drawing and seeing, making and assessing where one is, stimulates the creative process.

Regardless of whether Kentridge’s drawings for projection come together in a series that examines apartheid, capitalist greed, eros, memory, or whatever, his process is not based on the theme of the series. The works result through the dictates of his creative practice of drawing a bit, shooting the drawing, and then drawing and shooting some more. The activity involves walking between the camera and the drawing and includes erasure as well as the ongoing progression to the work’s conclusion. Krauss also does a nice job of relating Kentridge’s technique to the ideas of Eisenstein, Deleuze, Cavell and others.

Aside from these two extraordinary essays, the book struck me as choppy. Although I am a big fan of Sol LeWitt’s work, and he is one artist that comes up frequently in Krauss’ writing, I thought Krauss’ commentary on him seemed dated. With Kentridge’s work and Marclay’s Video Quartet, by contrast, I felt that reading her critique enhanced my understanding of these artists. Debating how to convey my overall response to the volume, I am drawn to a comment in the book itself. Krauss thanks her editor at MIT, Roger Conover, for his help and mentions that she is grateful he supported the project despite the “publishing world’s disapproval of anthologies” (p. x). Reading this volume I better understand why this sentiment exists. To be sure, Krauss has considerably influenced contemporary art history, and her writings (particularly essays for ArtForum and October) highlight her intellectual gifts and legacy. Yet, throughout the book Krauss offers minimalist explanations as to where the essays fit within the larger body of art criticism. Thus, although no doubt unintentional, there seemed to be a certain conceit in this assemblage. While I can appreciate and understand why a scholar wants her voice to be heard, the contributions written specifically for this book are too sketchy. The introduction, for example, is only two half pages and two full ones. I ended up thinking that having an outside editor for the volume would have helped place her work critically within the larger scheme of things through broadly engaging with it. This feeling that an outsider commentator could have added some breadth to the discussion was particularly acute with the essays that go back to the 1970s.

I also wish more care had been given to the little touches that make a book reach out and help the reader place the details in relation to one another. Ironically, even thought I could easily see instructors including some of these essays in course readers to help students get a feel for discrete topics and specific artists, I also felt that an educator would end up using some of the oversights within the presentation to aid students in thinking about how writing most effectively communicates with an audience. It strikes me as odd that the poor editing job has a positive benefit as a classroom tool for looking at how an author can better organize a paper. One example, the illustrations are not well integrated into the article. Rather than including in-text references that would lead the reader to an image, the pictorial content simply co-exists with the articles. I think it makes more sense to walk the reader over to the image so that she realizes that there is a reference point for the textual elaboration, particularly when the image is not on the same page or across from the text.

All in all, the range of this volume demonstrates that Rosalind Krauss has a rich and fertile mind. Some of the longer essays are thought provoking and well worth reading. Some of the shorter essays bring to mind how little one can say in a brief critique. Taken as a whole, Perceptual Inventory highlights many of Krauss’ contributions to art criticism and will no doubt enhance the libraries of contemporary art historians.

Source: http://www.leonardo.info/reviews/jan2011/ione_krauss.php

The Betrayal (Nerakhoon) <http://leonardo.info/reviews/sept2010/san_kuras.php>
by Ellen Kuras, Director; Thavisouk Phrasavath, Co-Director
Reviewed by Abhijit Sen

Electronic Elsewheres: Media, Technology, and the Experience of Social Space <http://leonardo.info/reviews/sept2010/nino_berry.php>
by Chris Berry, Soyoung Kim, and Lynn Spigel, Editors
Reviewed by Martha Patricia Nino

Fleeing from Absence: Four Cross-Disciplinary Essays on Time, Its Nature and Its Interpretations <http://leonardo.info/reviews/sept2010/ox_ast.php>
by Olga Ast and Jula Druk
Reviewed by Jack Ox

Inside the Death Drive: Excess and Apocalypse in the World of the Chapman Brothers (Tate Liverpool Critical Forum, Vol. 11) <http://leonardo.info/reviews/sept2010/harle_harris.php>
by Jonathan Harris (ed.)
Reviewed by Rob Harle

La Scomparsa dell’Orologio Universale: Peter Watkins e I Mass Media Audiovisivi (The  Disappearance of The Universal Clock : Peter Watkins and Audio Visual Mass Media) <http://leonardo.info/reviews/sept2010/pennisi_duarte.php>
by German A. Duarte
Reviewed by Giuseppe Pennisi

Now Is the Time:  Art & Theory in the 21st Century <http://leonardo.info/reviews/sept2010/verstegen_vesters.php>
by Christel Vesters (coordinating editor), Jelle Bouwhuis, Ingrid Commandeur, Gijs Frieling, Margriet Schavemaker, Domeniek Ruyters, Editors
Reviewed by Ian Verstegen

Mapping the Moving Image. Gesture, Thought and Cinema circa 1900 <http://leonardo.info/reviews/sept2010/baetens_valiaho.php>
by Pasi Väliaho
Reviewed by Jan Baetens

Music and Cyberliberties <http://leonardo.info/reviews/sept2010/pennisi_burkart.php>
by Patrick Burkart
Reviewed by Giuseppe Pennisi

Out Of Our Heads: Why You Are Not Your Brain, and Other Lessons from the Biology of Consciousness <http://leonardo.info/reviews/sept2010/vines_noe.php>
by Alva Noë
Reviewed by John Vines

Popular Music of Vietnam: The Politics of Remembering, the Economics of Forgetting <http://leonardo.info/reviews/sept2010/zilberg_olsen.php>
by Dale A.Olsen
Reviewed by Jonathan Zilberg

Lars Becker-Larsen’s production of The Moving Earth offers a splendid chronicle of the scientific shift brought about through studies of planetary motion during the scientific revolution of the seventeenth century. The name of the film refers to the work establishing that Earth is a moving planet and the broadly based content tells the story of this discovery. Overall, the narrative highlights the controversy between geocentric and heliocentric perspectives that was a part of those debates; we learn of how the key thinkers in Renaissance Europe who studied the celestial framework developed the ideas that ultimately moved science away from the Church’s doctrine that the earth was the immoveable center of the universe.

Although the story is well known, this presentation is robust and includes some degree of in-depth analysis. There is a good measure of reference to Plato and Aristotle as well as some extension of the ideas through the nineteenth century when Foucault’s pendulum showed the rotation of the earth. Performances in key settings, cultural garb, and insightful commentary provide the viewer with a full sense of the events and how the natural scientists overturned the Aristotelian idea of the “Unmoved Mover.” [To oversimplify, this idea is used to explain how the universe was first set into motion and medieval scholasticism later translated Aristotle’s “Prime Mover” into the Christian God].

The strength of the film is its multi-dimensional quality. Visual elements such as historical engravings, paintings, animations, and manuscripts aid the presentation immensely and bring a realistic element into play that knits the ideas of several periods of history together into a seamless fabric. Much of this is quite subtle. For example, showing manuscript pages and still artwork might seem mundane, but in this case I found that the variety of these backdrops created a living sense of the cultural life.

Particularly insightful are the discussions of topics involving the clash between science and religion, exemplified by the treatment of Galileo (and the Pope’s 1992 apology for the legal process against Galileo). In this case, George Coyne of the Vatican Observatory points out that the Church’s lukewarm admission of responsibility for its persecution of Galileo left much to be desired and that the conflict between science and religion evident at that time is still a part of cultural discussions. [Coyne’s candor isn’t totally surprising. He is also a vocal opponent of intelligent design theory that often sneaks a Creator God in through the back door. Indeed, some say Coyne was forced out of his Vatican position because of his willingness to speak publicly about his views opposing intelligent design.]

One of the most powerful unstated aspects of this production is the way it brings to mind debates outside of its topic. The producer understands the power of these old manuscripts in conveying the ideas of the thinkers the film presented. Looking at the repeated use of the physical volumes, I wondered how the e-books that are capturing our imaginations today will fare in a few centuries. In the film, the pages and the outside boards of these very old books serve as more than visual props that helped make the research come alive. Shots of their spines, title pages and internal pages, particularly the notebook pages filled with charts and graphs, effectively demonstrated that ideas that drove the research were not pulled from the air. When the actor playing Kepler is poring over Tycho Brahe’s years of collected data, he conveys the intensity of Tycho’s observations of the heavens as well as Kepler’s desire to solve the problem of motion. I was enthralled even though I was familiar with many of the details, and found myself moved to think about things I had previously taken for granted.

Still, it was a marriage of these artifacts with new technologies, too. Many of the visuals that accompanied the film were “moving” because of the nature of the work. One good example of how the director used new technologies to his advantage was the animation of the notes on a page of Kepler’s Harmonices Mundi (The Harmony of the Worlds, 1619). Here, the watching the notes as one listens to them succeeds in elevating the discussion of Kepler’s work relating the harmony and congruence in geometrical forms and physical phenomena to the harmonic proportions in music.

I believe the portraits of Tycho Brahe and Kepler were the strongest, at least in terms of presenting new details on their work that stoked my curiosity. For example, I never before thought about whether Kepler conceived all of the images in his publications or had an artist do this work for him. Many, like his Platonic solid model of the Solar system from Mysterium Cosmographicum (1600), are well known. I had always assumed he did it himself, but I didn’t fully conceptualize how many drawings were in the book. Others, like the frontispiece of the Rudolphine Tables, seem unlikely to be his.

By extension, I found the abundance of visual material, which added immensely to the script, also left me disappointed in terms of its informational value. Indeed, my one complaint with the production is that so many of the paintings, drawings, and prints, that appeared to be from the period discussed, are not attributed. That said, citing the creator of the work during the script would have been distracting, so perhaps this criticism is unfair. Moreover, when I looked up one myself, a painting of Cardinal Bellarmine (the “Hammer of the Heretics” who served as one of the judges at the trial of Giordano Bruno and concurred in the decision that condemned him to be burnt to death as an obstinate heretic), I found that the painter is unknown.

One of the points frequently mentioned in The Moving Earth is that before the work of these seventeenth century scientists combined the movements of the earth with those of the heavens, it was believed that the Earth was the center of the universe and other objects go around it. In addition, heaven was considered as a domain separate from earth. Listening to quantum theorists explain that the quantum domain is unlike that of our Newtonian reality has always reminded me of the debates that ushered in modern science. At the end of this film, the astronomer Owen Gingrich points out that the actual “proof” of the Newtonian framework was not provided until the nineteenth century (with Herschel’s discovery of Uranus, measurements of parallax, and Foucault’s pendulum showing the rotation of the earth). He then goes on to say that cases like this show that proofs don’t play too strong a role in our understanding of science. Rather, what we are looking for is a coherent picture and that was provided by the mathematics of Isaac Newton. In effect, this sequence also put its finger on something that kept coming to mind as I watched the film. The sequence on Tycho Brahe, who is known for his accurate and comprehensive astronomical and planetary observations, reminded me that Niels Bohr, another Danish scientist, who did transformative research in physics. Bohr, of course, lived much later and is known for his foundational contributions to understanding atomic structure and quantum mechanics for which he received the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1922. Yet, both were involved in cosmological frameworks that they propelled forward for others to finish.

Like many, I was introduced to the key figures and events in this production at a young age. Thus, I am aware of this film’s potential as a classroom tool. Having looked at the details from many perspectives over the years, I find it astonishing that this presentation is so refreshing because much of the narrative did not present new ideas or change my thinking. It is how this production is brought to life with manuscripts, paintings, superb animations and dramatic re-creations of key events that sets it apart. The script brings the events to life and captures the scientific creativity as well as a cultural climate governed by a Church that felt threatened by the new ideas of Copernicus, Tycho Brahe, Galileo, Johannes Kepler, Giordano Bruno, and Isaac Newton. Another component of note is that the commentary by experts [Simon Schaffer (Cambridge University), John Christianson (Luther College), Owen Gingerich (Harvard University), George Coyne (Vatican Observatory) and Patricia Fara (Cambridge University)] adds immensely to the performance and carefully chosen visuals. Others, too, have noted the excellence of this presentation. To date, The Moving Earth has won several awards. These include the Grand Prix at the 13th AVICOM Film Festival, Turin Italy. February 15, 2010; the Best Documentary Film at the Vedere la Scienza Festival – International Scientific Film Festival, Milano. Italy, April 2009, and the Grand Prix at the 46th International Festival TECHFILM 2009. Prague, Czech Republic, March 2009. If Leonardo had a rating system, I would give The Moving Earth five stars.

As I was ready to turn in this review, it became clear that a postscript is necessary. As noted earlier, this film conveys that the details surrounding the moving earth research are still alive in cultural discourse, particularly when science and religion are discussed in tandem. Even as I write there is a new event to add to the chronology. On May 22, 2010, Polish priests reburied the 16th century astronomer Nicolaus Copernicus and declared him a universal hero. Nearly 500 years after he was put to rest in an unmarked grave, his remains were sprinkled with holy water. The new tombstone, which is decorated with a model of the solar system, identifies this revolutionary astronomer as the founder of heliocentric theory, and a church canon (a cleric ranking below a priest). And so, the chronology has now added yet another event to all that the movie presents.

Distributor’s website:  http://icarusfilms.com/new2009/mov.html

Source: Leonardo Reviews: http://www.leonardo.info/reviews/june2010/ione_becker.php