Event 1: Hammer Museum

Stories of Almost Everything
The Hammer museum is home to many exhibits, but two of them stood out to me on my previous visit. The first was titled Stories of Almost Everything and was basically a large room full of random objects. I looked at everything from a single matchstick on the ground to a string of balloons on the ceiling which said, "I KNOW VERY WELL BUT NEVERTHELESS" to five old telephone poles also laying on the floor together. Each of these had a description near it which gave a straight-forward description of exactly what the art piece was. While many people (including myself) probably wouldn't consider the pieces in this exhibit to be art, it really depends on the context which the pieces are presented in. Before walking in, there was a description on the wall which explained that the entire exhibit was about how something like a museum acts a mediator between the artist and the viewer. In this context, the museum functions by helping to interpret the artist's creative intentions (which can exist even in unexpected objects). This exhibit serves to represent exactly what Bohm wrote about in his paper titled On Creativity which states that creativity broader than what we traditionally think about.

Lawrence Abu Hamdan
Me and one of the workers
The other gallery which stood out to me was the Hammer Projects: Lawrence Abu Hamdan exhibit which was about a Syrian prison in which prisoners were tortured using sensory deprivation of sight and sound along with being able to hear other prisoners being tortured. In the exhibit there were schematics of what the prison may have looked like which was a great example of the intersection between science and art.






Sources:

Bohm, David, and Lee Nichol. On Creativity. Routledge, 2010.

 Snow, C. P. The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution. Cambridge University Press, 1959.

 Vesna, Victoria. “Toward a Third Culture: Being In Between.” Leonardo, vol. 34, no. 2, 2001, pp. 121–125., doi:10.1162/002409401750184672.


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