Nature of Neptune: Chemistry

Peter Fischli and David Weiss's 1987 film, The Way Things Go, has become a classic art film, still shown in contemporary art museums around the world. The Swiss artist's timeless work, which documents a thirty minute long chain reaction using commonly found objects, is still as fascinating to watch today as it was twenty years ago.

The chain reaction was set up in a large warehouse room, and includes objects like tires, planks, water, gasoline, candles, and fuses. The clip above shows a segment of the film especially devoted to fire and pyrotechnics. There is no mystery to the work; the artists do a fantastic job of breaking down physical phenomena into simple, mesmerizing steps. It is an exercise in ways to transfer energy between different objects and systems.

The real genius of The Way Things Go is its timing. The reactions are paced in a way that makes clear what is happening at each step, but also has a spellbinding rhythm in which objects speed up, slow down, and build into each other. This fastidious pacing is what sets this piece apart from a mechanical assembly line, or many Rube Goldberg contraptions. This use of time scale calls to mind the kinetic sculptures of Arthur Ganson, and perhaps Ganson was influenced by Fischli and Weiss.

As a philosophy, the scientific method holds one axiom above all others: objectivity. Unbiased observation of measurable evidence forms the basis for reproducible experiments that seek to uncover fundamental truths about nature. The objectivity of this method has helped push the frontiers of our knowledge to incredible limits.

However, the proliferation and success of the scientific method has led us to sometimes assume that objectivity equals truth. Artist Spencer Finch demonstrates the precariousness of this assumption through large scale, thought-provoking installations. In these installations, Finch takes of careful, studied observations of certain characteristics of scene, such as hue and luminosity of light, and recreates them in a new context.

Recently exhibited at MASS MoCA in North Adams, Massachusetts, CIE 529/418 (Candlelight) consists of an entire wall of stained glass windows that reproduce the exact same color profile as candlelight (photo by srdaly11). Finch used a colorimeter to precisely measure the RGB values of the light eight inches from a burning candle. The room is beautiful and hypnotizing to stand in, and asks the viewer how similar and how different the experience really is to the illumination from a room full of candles. He has broken candlelight into window panes of different color that vary in luminosity with the strength of the sunlight. If the light in the room is precisely the same hue as the light from a candle, is it the same light? Finch shows how important context is to the meaning of objective measurements.

The photo to the right is of another piece by Finch that uses similar ideas as Candlelight (photo by Spor). This piece, called Shade (At the Grave of Walt Whitman, October 19, 2006, 10:15 am), recreates the hue and luminosity of the light at an exact place and an exact time. Again, Finch is asking the viewer what exactly these objective measurements have to do with the emotions and feelings associated with a scene. Is any emotion conveyed? And if so, is it due to the precise measurement of light, or to the stylistic way Finch has broken the light up into overlapping colored ovals?

The MASS MoCA restrospective also included the piece to the left, called Night Sky, Over the Painted Desert, Arizona, January 9, 2004 (photo from Finch's website). In this installation, Finch mixed colors of pigment to achieve the precise hue of the sky described in the title. He then created light bulb models of each of the pigment's molecular structures. By hanging these from the ceiling, Finch compares the hanging lights to the way the actual sky would have looked. In doing so, he asks how well scientific models can recreate reality. The beautiful installation does seem to convey a sense of the original Arizona night sky, but only to a point. The piece occupies a middle ground between abstracted concepts and recreating an actual scene, asking the viewer how closely objective measurement really brings us to the truth.