Dion's Neokom Herbarium is an enormous rotting Hemlock tree encased within a giant terrarium. In describing his work as an artist, Dion says that he is not interested in nature, but in ideas about nature (Art:21 Interview). By removing the tree from the forest and allowing it to decay within the museum, Dion works to "enhance the uncanniness of nature" in order to motivate viewers to consider their relationship to nature by exposing "the sense of the marvelous" in this fallen tree that continues to spawn new life everyday (Art:21 Interview). Dion's piece reminds me of Surrealism's fascination with the Praying Mantis that can even "play dead" a short time after it is actually dead. Is it fair to say then, that contemporary artists are undermining the idea of nature as orderly, while scientists seek to make visible the order within nature?
On Wednesday I heard this story by Robert Krulwich about the unusual structure of our galaxy. Krulwich begins by saying that twenty years ago "we thought there were rules about building solar systems," but that new research has completely upended these rules. (Talk about uncanny, check out the double gas explosion created by the explosion of the star, Eta Carinae taken at the European Southern Observatory).
Krulwich asks Mike Brown, an Astronomy professor at Cal Tech, when we look at how galaxies form what is normal or in other words, the predominant order of events? Brown replies that currently,"we have no idea[. . .]I have no idea what to expect." While certainly Astronomers have not stopped looking for patterns in the formation of solar systems, its just that Brown, for instance, no longer assumes that he will find them. Perhaps what artists and scientists share when they look out at the natural world is not a sense of certainty in knowing how the world works, but instead, actually a great deal of uncertainty. We just cannot know or anticipate all the ways that the Hemlock or Eta Carinae will change as they decay.
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