The Gay-Science Museum

Yinka Sonibare 'effective, defective, creative', 2000 Video projection Part of the 'Talking Points' series of exhibits on the ground floor of the Science museum's Wellcome Wing.

In this brief paper I consider ways in which the tendency towards 'experimentalism' in the arts and in society more generally - which I see as an increasingly visible cultural phenomenon - could and should be represented in museums and other institutions. I originally started to think about these questions as a result of a request from Hannah Redler, who curates the displays of contemporary art at the Science Museum in London. Hannah asked me to prepare a consultation paper about possible new strategies for incorporating such work, in particular media-based projects, in an institution like the Science Museum. Hannah and the Science Museum have gone a long way to changing the perception that art is superfluous to the supposedly more serious business of displaying the material culture of science, whereas the contemporary art world still has problems engaging with science and technology. Following the endeavours of curators such as Hannah this paper is an attempt to offer an alternative understanding of culture, the relationship between art and science, and the cultural meaning of experimentation.

We tend to regard science as the privileged domain in which experimentation takes place, and in which scientific, experimental methods are used to find out about the world. Institutions such as science museums tend to reinforce this separation. Yet it can be argued that this presents both a false separation and an overvaluation of science in relation to the rest of culture. Rather than being the master discipline which sets the standards by which we are able to judge truth and knowledge, science is perhaps a particular kind of experimental practice in a more general experimental culture. The experimental is pervasive throughout culture and, for many of us, life is increasingly a kind of experimental process, in which to a lesser or greater extent we have to discover or invent our bodies, our selves and our communities - culture is the laboratory in which these experiments take place, and our media are some of the principle tools we use. The forms these experiments can take are many and often problematic, including gender reassignment, psychoanalysis, body transformation through plastic surgery, anorexia or bulimia, or prosthetic additions to our biological body, through new kinds of family and other relationships, new kinds of communities, new ways of working, new modes and forms of production.

The roots of this experimental culture can be seen to go back, in the West at least, to the Renaissance in the 16th century and the beginnings of the modern scientific world view in the 17th century, and to the Romantic ideals of self-creation in the late 18th and early 19th century, as well as the inexorable rise of market capitalism as the dominant force in society. In his famous essay 'Science as Vocation' Max Weber suggests that it is the experimentalism of Renaissance artists such as Leonardo that fosters the scientific method, rather than vice versa¹. Capitalism, in particular in its current 'late' phase is predicated on harnessing the experimental drives of its subjects and exploiting the desires these drives make manifest. In the 19th century Charles Darwin showed that life is one long experiment, while Karl Marx, who demanded that we experiment with changing the world, rather than merely describing it, and Friedrich Nietzsche, for whom the death of God required that we engage in a testing process of self creation, while moving into the 20th Century Sigmund Freud showed that what we think we know is actually a result of continuing experiments in reality testing. Experimental culture's most obvious outcome is science itself, which has transformed our existence dramatically and has also transformed our understanding of the world and our place within it. But science is only one aspect of this culture, and perhaps not the most important.

In cultural and political terms the freedom to experiment with new forms of social arrangements has been part of a process of liberation from fixed hierarchies and subjectivities. This can be seen throughout the last 200 years, from the Romantic brotherhoods in the early 19th century, through to Feminism, Gay Liberation and commune culture in the late 20th century, but has also led to the most repressive and violent political regimes in human history, included the Nazis, Stalinist rule in the Soviet Union, Pol Pot in Cambodia among many others and experiments in the 'engineering of human souls'.

At the same time experimentalism found expression in the arts, with the avant garde, in which experimentation was both an important strategy and a form of expression. From the early experiments in expression of DADA, the Futurists, the Surrealists, through to postwar avant garde artists, groups and movements, such as John Cage, Fluxus, early performance, video and conceptual art, as well as those involved in experimental music, free jazz and improvisation. That artists in the mid-twentieth century saw themselves as experimental researchers is nicely indicated by the existence of groups such as Experiments in Art and Technology, founded in the United States in 1966, or the plethora of so-called 'Arts Labs' that emerged in Britain in the late 60s. To this might be added the idea of the artists as researcher, or even, in Hal Foster's phrase, artist as ethnographer that emerged in the 1970s and 80s ². Much of the same spirit of experimentalism, which is mostly lacking in contemporary mainstream art found in galleries such as Tate, is to be found in so-called new media art.

Marlene Dumas 'The Experiment' & 'The Expert' Both from the 'Rejects' series, 1995 Mixed media on paper Located in the Who am I? gallery in the Science Museum's Wellcome Wing.

Mainstream art galleries perhaps have trouble recognising this kind of work as art, at least until sufficient time has passed for it to join the canon, precisely because of its experimental nature. Such work is always, implicitly or explicitly, an experiment about art itself. By extension whatever is produced must exceed what can be recognised as art. If it did not, if it could be easily defined as art, then it would not be experimental. The idea of art as experiment or research must not be mistaken as some kind of 'science envy', in which artists crave some of the institutional respectability of science and its supposedly more secure claims to truth. In a sense the opposite is more true. A great deal of scientific work is not experiment, but testing, in highly defined and restricted circumstances. Unlike with the experimental practices undertaken by artists of the sort described above, scientists cannot afford to exceed what can be recognised by their peers as science. Only when a Kuhnian 'paradigm shift' takes place does science exceed itself ³. Paradoxically artists are the true experimentalists in culture, not scientists, and art is the place where the very question of what exceeds the known can be properly asked. Interestingly at the edges of what might still be recognised as science, in areas such as artificial life, what is produced resembles (new media) art as much as it resembles scientific research.

Central to experimental culture is the use of tools, whether they are scientific instruments, information technologies or new media. The more powerful the tools the greater is the capacity to make useful experiments and meaningful statements. The greater is the degree of access to such tools, the greater is the capacity for experimentation. The kinds of investigations that constitute science for example cannot take place without the instruments used. One might go further and say that the 'facts' those investigations supposedly uncover do not exist outside of those instruments. This does not prevent those facts being repeatable and robust, as long as the same kinds of instruments are used, and the facts discovered universally true in that they can be repeated in this manner regardless of the context. But without the apparatus of scientific method, and perhaps most importantly without the observation by scientific peers of experiments, facts of this sort cannot exist for us. Thus what is produced by science is not a transparent representation of things as they are, but a particular form, albeit both powerful and robust, of contingent enunciation, which produces the truth as much if not more than it represents it (see for example Schaffer and Shapin ⁴, on early modern experimental culture or Latour and Woolgar ⁵ on 'laboratory life' or Latour ⁶ on 'science in action').

To succeed and prosper science needs the means to circulate results as much as it needs the laboratory. The invention of printing was crucial to the rise of science, as it allowed ideas, and images, to be circulated widely in a stable form, what Bruno Latour describes as 'immutable mobiles' ⁷. More generally printing was one of the main means by which new ideas about social and cultural organisation were circulated, and control over the printing presses was important for maintaining social control. Similarly the mass media, newspapers, film, radio, television, have always been largely controlled either by government or by the interests of investors and owners. Yet, from the pamphleteers of the English Civil War through to guerrilla TV artists of the late 1960s, the domination and control of the media has always been contested and opposed, and alternatives explored. The media has long been one of principle means by which new social forms and ideas have been experimented with and discussed.

But in practical terms the older media and tools have remained largely under the control of the dominant powers within society. Printing, radio, film, and television all required, and indeed do still largely require costly and complex apparatus to be used effectively. Even if production was possible distribution was often harder to undertake. By contrast the tools that are now available are extraordinarily easy to use and what is produced can be easily distributed. Consumers have become producers in an emergent 'DIY' or 're-mix' culture, in which cultural productions are no longer passively consumed, but become the basis for cooption, reconfiguration and detournement and other forms of experimentation, in which we have access to numerous different points of view and perspectives, and in which our media offer far more explicit opportunities for 'self creation', for constructing personal narratives through which we can represent our conceptions of our selfhood and the course of our lives, which in turn opens out to a greater appreciation for the contingent selves of others, and in which we can go beyond the idea that the means by which we represent the world, our media, can ever offer us access to some final truth 'out there' in the world. The world is far too complex and contingent for this to be the case. There are endless facts, small and large about the world, and even more opinions and interpretations of those facts, but these can never amount to a final statement of truth, or even anything like a total understanding.

The idea that such a truth is possible, or even necessary, is an illusion largely sustained by our traditional media forms, including books, museums, and mass media such as newspapers and television. These in turn are structured on a quasi-religious model of the media as conduits for transcendent truth and authority. But with the increasing ubiquity of so-called 'new media' this is changing. Blogs, Wikis, open-source software, and peer-to-peer networks are among the means by which our mass media is being superseded by other kinds of decentralised forms of representation and exchange, and which are overturning the traditional model of media as the dissemination of facts and ideas from the centre outwards, with little or no reciprocity. These new media offer us an opportunity to move beyond the overarching narratives offered by science, religion or proscriptive political thinking, and to engage with the contingency of our existence and acknowledge that how we understand that existence is determined by our media and our tools. Furthermore they give us more opportunities to experiment with how we might understand ourselves and our world.

Perhaps the most important point is that, with the rise of digital or so-called 'new' media, the means of experimentation, production, representation, distribution and consumption are all the same. The technology used by a blogging teen or a member of MySpace, or a net.artist, is more or less the same as that used by a journalist working for a newspaper or, perhaps most importantly, a scientist working on DNA, or Artificial Life or whatever. This is not to suggest that blogging or being on MySpace or making net.art is the same as those kinds of scientific work, but to propose rather that all are different aspects of a culture in which the experimental is the dominant mode of engagement and production.

This leads to the idea of the 'Gay-Science Museum', which is obviously intended to be a little flippant and provocative. By this title I do not intend to suggest that institutions such as the Science Museum should somehow become involved with the representation of a science or scientific study of homosexuality, though a certain 'queering' of science might be in order. It is taken from the title of one of Friedrich Nietzsche's most famous books,⁸ originally published as Die frhliche Wissenschaft; 'la Gaya Scienza'. It was his attempt to think a new kind of affirmative, perspectivalist science that would go beyond the metaphysical pretensions of science as it was then (and perhaps still is now). The term derives from the mediaeval Provenal description of poetry, as practiced by the troubadours. It allows us to think of poetry and art as science, and science as a kind of poetry, or making. Thus what I would like to see is a space that reflects on culture as science, and science as part of culture, that refuses hard and fast distinctions between science on the one hand and art on the other, as they become increasingly hard to distinguish, particularly in the context of the increasing ubiquity of new media. I would like to see art in the science museum, not as some extraneous, barely tolerated extra, or decoration, added onto the serious business of talking about Science, but as another important aspect of a more general experimental culture. And I would like to see science in the art museum, not as some kind of legitimation of or explanation for how artists see the world, but another form of experimental representation.

Antony Gormley 'Iron baby', 1999 Cast Iron Located in the Who am I? gallery in the Science Museum's Wellcome Wing.

Notes

¹ Weber, M. (1976), On Universities: The Power of the State an the Dignity of the Academic Calling,. University of Chicago Press, Chicago, pp141 - 42.

² Foster, H. (1996), The Return of the real. MIT Press, Cambridge, Mass.

³ Kuhn, T. S. (1970), The structure of scientific revolutions. University of Chicago Press, Chicago.

⁴ Shapin, S. and S. Schaffer (1985), Leviathan and the air-pump: Hobbes, Boyle, and the experimental life. Princeton University Press, Princeton, N.J.

⁵ Latour, B. and S. Woolgar (1979), Laboratory life: the social construction of scientific facts. Sage Publications, Beverly Hills.

⁶ Latour, B. (1987), Science in action: how to follow scientists and engineers through society. Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Mass

⁷ Ibid, pp226-7

⁸ Nietzsche, F. W. (1974), The gay science; with a prelude in rhymes and an appendix of songs. Vintage Books, New York.

I would like to thank Hannah Redler, Head of Arts Programme at the Science Museum, London, for both providing the context in which this paper was first conceived and in helping to make it better and in generously providing illustrations.

Charlie Gere, 2007
All images courtesy of the Science Museum, London. sciencemuseum.org.uk

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