Event 2: Fowler Museum

Me and an employee at Fowler

For my second event of the quarter, I went to the Fowler museum on UCLA's campus. During my trip, I visited two exhibits being hosted there. The titles of these exhibits are Intersections: World Arts, Local Lives and Reflecting Culture: The Francis E. Fowler, Jr. Collection of Silver and I saw that both of these exhibits relate to the class in different ways.

Performing Knowledge piece
and its multimedia component

First up was the Intersections exhibit. This piece of the museum contained art pieces from all over the globe (Africa, Asia, Americas) and from a very large range of time (from five thousand years ago to now). What tied each piece of this exhibit together was the fact that they all were art pieces which interacted with the lives of people around them during their respective times. One of the art pieces, titled Performing Knowledge, really stood out to me. While the pieces in the exhibit were very old, including this one, the display made use of modern technology (video and audio recording) in order to provide more context and help develop a better understanding of the meaning of the artwork. This piece is a perfect example of the crossover between science and art which we have been discussing in class. This contrast between ancient and modern technology may seem contradictory on the surface, but it is actually beneficial to modern viewers.

Example of the Reflecting
Culture exhibit

The other exhibit I visited was Reflecting Culture: The Francis E. Fowler, Jr. Collection of Silver. This exhibit showed off hundreds of different objects ranging from being five hundred to one hundred years old, all of which came from different parts of the world, and all of which were made from silver. While it is impressive to see how different cultures have chosen to use the raw material of silver to produce an enormous range of items, I think it is more interesting to consider the fact that each piece in the collection serves as both an art piece and an impressive technological creation. While it doesn't seem like it now, metalwork is a complicated science and was once a cutting edge technology. In this context, this cutting edge tech was used to not only create something useful but to also create something beautiful. This is the same concept seen in the modern day crossover between biotechnology and art, as done by artists like Joe Davis or Eduardo Kac. These new artists using biotechnology as their medium are similar to those who made the silver artifacts in the exhibit because they both take advantage of the technology available to them in order to create something new and artistic.

Overall, the Fowler museum had an interesting collection of exhibits which were both impressive and thought provoking. Because of my background knowledge due to this class, each exhibit was enhanced by the fact that I could look at it from multiple perspectives or contexts.

References:

Kac, Eduardo. “GFP BUNNY.” GFP Bunny, www.ekac.org/gfpbunny.html#gfpbunnyanchor.

McKenna, Phil. “Joe Davis: The Mad Scientist of MIT?” New Scientist, New Scientist, 23 Mar. 2012, www.newscientist.com/blogs/culturelab/2012/03/the-mad-scientist-of-mit.html.

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