Art + Science + Religion = Progress? Tom Jeffreys thinks maybe.
What is it about the organ? There's something in its sonorous rumblings that never fails to take me back to our little prep school chapel, its rich cloths, stained glass and language of aloofly floral elegance. “Keep me as the apple of an eye, hide me under the shadow of thy wings,” we prayed at candlelit Wednesday evening Compline. Forsan et haec olim meminisse iuvabit* was etched in stone upon the lintel. Good old Virgil – how true that seems right now.
I'm at St John on Bethnal Green, the majestic Sir John Soane-designed church just next to Bethnal Green tube station. I'm knackered, nursing a glass of red wine and sitting on a pew in semi-darkness. Behind and above is Quantum Flapdoodle, an improvised performance by artist Victoria Browne and organist David Sutton. A deep thrumming fills the nave and echoes through my heart. Victoria – out of sight – intones, soft and quiet, little phrases, to which Sutton responds. Sounds ebb and flow: bleeps and squeals and fragments of ecclesiastical melody.
The piece stems from Victoria's investigation into CERN's much-publicised Large Hadron Collider. Her work is an attempt to explore its aesthetics and its implications in a way that neither a scientist nor a journalist (with all their conflicting obligations) ever could. The words and phrases she employs here demonstrate this merging of the scientific with the artistic, the pragmatic with the mystical: Dark Matter, Data Collector, “Three Quarks for Muster Mark” (from Finnegans Wake), and the classic cultural theory question, “Is representation mainly a matter of 'power' for culturally and socially encoded institutional practices?”.
Up some stairs and into a darkly cobwebbed belfry: an installation piece, also by Victoria, that plays apparently, with the search for the elusive Higgs boson (“a hypothetical massive scalar elementary particle predicted to exist by the Standard Model of particle physics” – thanks Wikipedia). Utilising 19th century hachuring techniques on various glass slides, Victoria has produced a kind of shimmering topographical pattern. A projector causes these bright little notches of light to mark the wood and masonry, high and brown and old, in the church's belfry.
Back downstairs and spread across a table are a selection of artist books by Jaume Rocamora, curated by Alicia Canes Chved. Deceptively simple, these calm, contained grey cardboard constructions beg to be handled, to be taken apart and reassembled. Rocamora's work echoes Brutalist architecture, David Hockney's ad-flat swimming pool paintings and those little children's puzzles you used to get: starkly geometric, but multi-layered and strangely satisfying.
Leaving aside the obvious implications of holding an art exhibition about science in a religious building, let's finish on Victoria's final phrase in Quantum Flapdoodle: “Nature does not lend itself to the simplicity of science”. Science is about understanding, and therefore must involve simplification (modelling, equations, hypotheses etc); art, on the other hand, not 'about' anything. That is why the splicing of the two together – as happens in this calmly provocative exhibition, and increasingly elsewhere – is so consistently productive. Let us hope it's something that continues; indeed, while we're here, let us pray.
1+1+1 is at St John on Bethnal Green until 19th September 2010.
*Perhaps one day it will please you to remember even these things.
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