Art and science are thought to be mutually exclusive—right brain, left brain. As in: oil painting is art not science, and molecular biology is science not art. However, like the two halves of the brain, both are profoundly interconnected, feeding into and off of each others progress. In other words, there is not a rift between art and science as much as an open border across which ideas move like migrants, bringing with them new perspectives and effecting changes. In this border region between art and science, the works of Andrew Yang and Camille Henrot thrive.

Although they both have exhibitions in the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago that point to similar interdisciplinary concepts, the artists themselves arrived there by different roads. Camille Henrot, born and raised in France, began a successful career as an artist and was awarded access by way of a Smithsonian Artist Research Fellowship to the museums’ extensive collections, access that led to the creation of her MCA video installation, “Grosse Fatigue.” Andrew Yang, on the other hand, received a PhD in biology from Duke university, and his artwork, featured in a solo show at the MCA, flows directly from his scientific studies. Thus, while Henrot gives an artist’s insight into a scientific institution, Yang brings insights from a scientific institution into the world of art.

 

 

The central work of Yang’s MCA exhibition is “the Way within,” a table of many small found objects neatly arranged by color. While some of these objects, like a red stone, were  naturally formed, others were man-made, like a bent and rusty soda can. By way of their careful aesthetic arrangement though, the various items seem of a single family, styrofoam blending in with the seashells. Yang asks the viewer to imagine how all of these objects that are traditionally considered to differ in their origins are actually composed of the same elements and all born from stars, traces of the Milky Way galaxy manifested within each of their chemical arrangements.

 

 

Another of Yang’s works, titled “Stella’s Stoichiometry (all things being equal, 6 lbs. 13 oz.)” points to similar concepts, but with a human-centered twist. For this work, Yang created a representation of his baby daughter via her elemental makeup—jars of various substances, from sugar cubes to oyster shells, contain the same mass of the same elements as she did at birth. Obviously, the jars look nothing like Stella, but the work raises interesting questions about the universal nature of matter. What is it in human beings that is more than the elemental sum of their parts? More than a few seashells and canola oil? Through his clever artistic practice, Yang invites a scientific mode of perception, dismissing traditional creative mindsets in favor of matter-based representation to reveal the strange nature of existence.

 

 

Conversely, Camille Henrot does not apply science to art like Yang—instead, she aestheticizes scientific study. In “Grosse Fatigue,” Henrot takes the excess of knowledge held within the Smithsonian institutions and edits it into a vibrant but overwhelming film. Beginning on a computer desktop with a Google search into the origins of the universe, the film seems to exist within an operating system, hunting for truth online through the glut of available images and text. Windows on the screen pop open with quick videos that play simultaneously—marbles rolling, sliding drawers of bird corpses, a green frog on an iPhone. This rapid montage occurs to the beat of an electronic soundtrack and beat poetry, only adding to the sensation of overflow. Consequently, by way of its chaotic, almost stressful qualities, the film mimics the feeling of being faced with the overabundance of human knowledge. Like Borges’ infinite library, the Smithsonian could be considered to shelter little knowledge as a result of containing too much random information.

 

 

Which isn’t to say that there is no meaning to be found in “Grosse Fatigue,” as, although overwhelming, it creates profound sentiments of universality through its montage of images. What does a video of a nude woman have to do with the photograph of J. R. Oppenheimer that pops up next to it? Very little, one might think, but Henrot reminds us that they are both part of the same story, the human story. In this way, the artist takes inaccessible scientific study and compresses it into the frames of her film to give an aesthetic perspective on humanity and the universe.

 

 

Thus, Henrot brings art to science, and Yang brings science to art. Both artists are working in the border region of the two disciplines, but they are crossing the line in different directions. That is, while both exhibitions express universality by bridging the two disciplines, they function using opposite forms of logic. Yang’s artwork may be presented in an artistic medium, but the logic of the work is scientific—he draws attention to the universality of things through their elemental makeup. Henrot, on the other hand, applies the artistic logic of filmmaking to the realm of science. In “Grosse Fatigue,” dissimilar things are made connected through visual language, through montage and graphic match. The universe, although chaotic and mysterious, has patterns, and these artists follow those patterns in their own unique ways—Yang plays artistically with the universe’s interior logic, and Henrot uses artistic logic to address its inherent complexity.

However, there is one language which both artists employ similarly in their exhibitions: the language of poetry. As mentioned earlier, Henrot’s film is narrated by the performance of poem. The text was written by Henrot and poem Jacob Bromberg, but is recited by Akwetey Orraca-Tetteh, a performance artist who brings a deeply human vitality to the film. The poem tells the story of the creation of the universe—or rather, “stories,” as it cuts and pastes creation myths from around the world into one eclectic narrative. “In the beginning… There was a single hill called Nunne Chaha” is followed closely by “In the beginning were quantum fluctuations.” In this way, the poem combines and confounds our religious and scientific stories to express the universality of human understanding.

 

 

Similarly, Yang makes use of poetry to explore the multiple meanings of “matter,” and thus invokes the universal nature of everything. Directly behind “the Way within,” Yang, his family and friends created a wall drawing of a poem that repeats “matter” in the context of its many associated words. “BIO MATTER PLANT MATTER SOLE MATTER SOUL MATTER,” reads one line. “BLACK LIVES MATTER,” reads another. Yang, through poetry, is expressing again the concept that we are all made of the same elements and originate from the same galactic source, but here he is applying that universal logic to the messiness of human language and culture. In the face of the universe, Yang writes, “what’s / the / matter / all is / matter.”

Like conceptual art, the universe can seem impossible to understand—even its relative size is too much for our little minds to comprehend. Andrew Yang and Camille Henrot may not hold the answers to life’s greatest questions, but by crossing the border between science and art, they do bring us closer to grasping that impossibility, the sublime impossibility of understanding everything.