The first—and extremely eye-catching—piece of art you will encounter at the Malloy Wing entrance to Molecules That Matter, the art-and-science exhibition at the Tang through April 13, 2008, is Jean Shin’s Chemical Balance 2, and it is a doozy.
It’s a shimmering sculptural installation made of—ready for this?—hundreds of those little orange prescription pill bottles, stacked up in shining towers set on round mirrors. Similar pill-towers dangle like stalactites from the gallery’s ceiling. The longest towers and spires are dozens of pill-bottles long and they very nearly—but not quite—meet in the middle.
So why pill bottles in an art museum? Well, because the piece appears in conjunction with penicillin, one of the show’s ten major modern molecules of the twentieth century. (Interestingly, Chemical Balance can be said to relate not only to its gallery-mate, penicillin, but also to two more of the exhibition’s top molecules: the antidepressant Prozac and, of course, the orange plastic of the little vials that both drugs come in.)
But there’s more: Peer closely at the little empty bottles and you note that patients’ names, dates, and prescriptions are clearly legible on some labels, while others are heavily blacked out: donators’ choice. There are sociocultural tales typed onto those labels, if we only knew how to read them. And when light blazes through Chemical Balance 2, especially on a bright day, all that meaning transforms into a startling example of visual beauty, albeit one comically cobbed together out of stuff we usually toss or recycle.
But picking favorites among the terrific artworks on display in Molecules is a very tough choice, because as critic Lisa Bramen wrote in the Glens Falls Post-Star, there’s enough outstanding contemporary artwork in the show to make up a perfectly good show of its own. For instance, there are Bryan Crockett’s Anger, Gluttony, and Sloth, three elegant, over-sized marble sculptures of lab mice, each representing a creature genetically designed to be used in a particular kind of medical research.
And there’s a delicious 1985 wall piece by Tony Cragg called New Figuration, a semi-human-shaped wall installation, standing some eight feet tall and made of bits and pieces of brightly colored scrap plastic items pasted directly onto the gallery wall.
It’s playful and a bit poignant—all those lost toys and broken garden tools, empty Bic lighters, etc. remind us that the damn plastic will take a kazillion years to biodegrade but once discarded, it becomes as transient as autumn leaves or days of our lives. Cragg, who was honored last fall with Japan’s prestigious Praemium Imperiale prize for sculpture, explains cheekily in the wall text that he chose plastic garbage as his art medium because, hey, it was cheap and plentiful.
In checking out any art exhibition, there’s always one piece that falls into the fanciful category of What I’d Steal if No One Were Looking and I Knew I’d Never Get Caught With the Goods. In Molecules, it’s the complete set of Roxy Paine’s six poured-molten-plastic sculptures, gleaming black and curvy as melted candle wax.
The accompanying wall text says Paine made these luscious, sensual pieces using a computer he programmed to release the flow of liquid plastic into various patterns; they hardened into low-density polyethylene sculptures. Ranging from about a foot to maybe 18 inches high, they’re shiny, glossy, sassy, and seemingly as touchable as caramel candy or smooth polished stone. You just want to reach out and rub them.
Full disclosure: The first thing I thought of when hearing that Molecules That Matter would showcase art as well as science and cultural history, was how will the art fit in with—and stand up to—the science-power generated by this big, innovative show? You’ll be gobsmacked at how stand-alone fine the Molecules art is.
Photo credits: Art Evans, for the Tang Museum
