Enlightenment in the darkness of the unknown
VISUAL ART
DUNCAN MACMILLAN

LUMEN DE LUMINE *****
TORNESS POWER STATION

MODERN ART was born of a conundrum: if you are part of the world how can you describe it? It was formulated by David Hume thus: "It is absurd to imagine we can ever distinguish betwixt ourselves and external objects." The truth of this was particularly critical for artists because in the previous century art had joined with science and philosophy with precisely that ambition, to understand the world by describing it. Painters soon realised that because objectivity is a paradox, the enterprise was doomed to fail. Rembrandt and Vermeer reflect on this, and Velasquez's Las Meninas is perhaps the greatest formulation of all of the impossibility of separating the observer from the observed.

Nevertheless, having recognised the problem, artists did not abandon the original ambition. They tried to incorporate the paradox into the solution and to describe the world from within; to proceed, recognising that they were inextricably part of any description and that they shape the world even as they describe it. Modern art was born, not from any perverse vision, but from the artists' increasingly acute awareness of the elusive complexity of what at first seemed so simple.

Science, meanwhile, ignored Hume's conundrum and maintained instead the fiction of the detached and objective observer. This worked very well until scientists came to quantum physics, the study of the fundamental particles from which our world is built. They discovered that on that level objectivity is impossible - the observer and the observed are locked in a dance that alters both. So, has science caught up with art?

It is an intriguing question. But first consider an apparently very different dance. On a dark, cold and windy night a girl in a red dress dances in the dark, projected on a vast screen on the East Lothian coast. As she dances, she is illuminated fitfully by the light from a single bulb that she whirls around her head on a long flex, like a cowboy with a lasso. The image flickers for a few minutes against the night, then disappears.

This happened on Thursday. The screen was the enormous blank north wall of Torness nuclear power station. Even though it is huge, both it and the dancing girl projected on to it were dwarfed by the much greater vastness of the night. It was easy to see this dance as an image of an individual human life: brief, shadowy, no more than a flicker in the darkness of the great unknown.

Equally, perhaps, it symbolised the strange dance of observer and observed - the quantum physicist and those elusive fundamental particles - for this film, made by artist Ken McMullen, was commissioned by CERN, the giant European particle accelerator. The film was made in one of the CERN accelerator tunnels. On one level at least, quantum physics is its subject.

The film also proposed a dialogue between Torness, where it was projected, and nearby Skateraw farm, where the projector was - between science and agriculture. At Skateraw, thanks to farmer John Watson's extraordinary generosity, one of the barns is home to Richard Demarco's collection. So, in this dialogue, Skateraw represents art as well as farming. However, that is no big step, as Watson reminded us, quoting Hume's friend Lord Kames, that farming itself is the chief of all the arts.

Whether you like it or not - and most distrust it profoundly - the technology harnessed at the power station is testimony to the way scientists have penetrated to the very heart of matter itself. And so the finger of light across the dark and windy space between the farm and the power station was reaching out from art to science. Projecting the fragile image of a dancing girl as a metaphor for a single human life, it was also emphatically restating the centrality of the human to the business of science. Without that it breeds monsters that may devour their creators. So, art has something crucial to offer science.

The idea of the film was Neil Calder's. He had been employed by CERN to make meaningful to the public what the organisation does, to tackle mistrust of science and the scientists' own lamentable lack of skill in explaining what they do. In this instance, as Calder remarked, McMullen shows a remarkable, intuitive grasp of science. The figure with her tiny light in the greater darkness could stand as a metaphor for what we have only recently understood, that the most of the universe is invisible to us - dark matter and dark energy. These are truths we can barely grasp except at this metaphorical level and which, thus far, the light of science itself cannot penetrate any more than the girl's swinging light bulb could illuminate the landscape.

This kind of profound reflection is not new to Skateraw, however. The coast there is the site of James Hutton's "nonconformity", the place where the strange configuration of the rocks provided Hutton (another farmer) with a key part of his proof of the nature of the earth's geology: that even the rocks themselves change constantly, but the expanse of time in which they do so is unimaginably vast. It extends "till a' the seas gang dry and the rocks melt wi' the sun." Burns was a visitor to Skateraw.

That fragile figure was dancing to a tune first composed by Hutton, therefore, or perhaps even to a song by Burns. Watson reminded us of these Enlightenment links and, as he did so, argued passionately that in the predicament in which we now find ourselves, we should reach back to the Enlightenment to relearn the convergence of the arts and sciences and the shared human focus that brought such strength then. The message from all the other speakers was the same. We must not repeat the mistakes of the 20th century, seeing the arts and sciences in opposition. They need each other. If we are to survive our environmental crisis, they must work together, and the dialogue proposed by that beam of light must be meaningful. Science needs the humanity symbolised by that dancing figure and that only the arts can bring, and we now need science to solve the problems that, unchecked by that sense of humanity, science has itself created. Art, farming, quantum physics and nuclear power seem unlikely bedfellows but they need each other. Their conjunction here, perhaps, points to the only possible way forward.

• An agreement is currently being sought to screen Lumen de Lumine for a 28-day period.

This article: http://living.scotsman.com/index.cfm?id=228152006

Last updated: 14-Feb-06 11:59 GMT