“It seems possible that any man intending to practice the plastic arts; or to know excellent from mediocre or inefficient in the plastic arts might, in our time, more readily awaken his eye by looking at spare parts and at assembled machinery than by walking through galleries of painting or sculpture”
Ezra Pound, Machine Art (1927-1930)
“In the domain of visual artifacts, fine art is a tiny minority. Despite the current interest in mass media and multiculturalism, art historians interested in images still study mainly painting, drawing, photography, and printmaking. […] I will be arguing that nonart images can be just as compelling, eloquent, expressive, historically relevant, and theoretically engaging as the traditional subject matter of art history, and that there is no reason within art history to exclude them from equal treatment alongside the canonical and extracanonical examples of art”.
James Elkins, The Domain of Images (1999)
The exhibition L’experiment com a obra d’art presents –within the framework of the 125th anniversary of de Faculty of Sciences– a selection of scientific instruments and scientific-technical images linked to the context of the former Faculty of Sciences of the Universitat de València, and, in particular, to its studies on chemistry. It follows the structure (exhibition technique, method and representation, distribution of space, language and narrative) of a canonical art exhibition, but subverts the expectations of the audience by replacing the ordinary pieces of the artistic exhibitor (painting, sculpture, printmaking…) with scientific instruments, machines, technologies, as well as visual representations produced by them in their act of service to science.
The exhibition L’experiment com a obra d’art celebrates the 125th Anniversary of the Faculty of Sciences by recovering the status that its creations deserve in the artistic-exhibitive context, to pay tribute to the common etymological origin of ingenuity, genius and apparatus, and to do justice to the texture of the world that loved us. To this end, it presents a selected selection of its works from the last 125 years, stressing the colour, form and style. It is a tribute to artistic multiculturalism that puts science and technology at the centre of the semiotic universe of the arts as everyday practices of knowledge production and cultural, social and political meaning. It crosses the boundaries of the traditional curating to resituate the techno-scientific object at the height of the post-vanguard commemoration of the plastic fact in contemporary civilization.
The idea is to choose a select group of scientific instruments and associated techno-scientific images and present them as art works (sculpture, painting, engraving…), in the format of a typical art exhibition, playing with the spectator’s expectations due to the atypical nature of such representation proposal.
In this exhibition approach we emphasise the artistic qualities of the pieces on display (scientific instruments), which in their design were primarily conceived with a utility objective. However, they are the objectification not only of epistemological qualities but also of aesthetic and even ethical qualities.
Therefore, the exhibition makes use of traditional, canonical exhibition trends and techniques, typical of an art exhibition in the Spanish State since the Transition. However, it replaces sculptural or pictorial pieces with techno-scientific objects. Each scientific instrument has a brief description analogous to that of a painting or sculpture, which will stress the material and technical qualities of the work’s production and its inscription in a certain period of the history of techno-scientific art. The main objective of the exhibition format is to promote and encourage the visiting public to enjoy the aesthetic pleasure of these pieces, while learning about a context in the history of art, of which they are unfamiliar.
The aim is to highlight the value of the scientific heritage of the Universitat de València, its scientific and medical collection and its Museum of the History of Medicine and Science. The exhibition (in virtual or in-person format) will be part of the activities of the Official Master's Degree in the History of Science and Scientific Communication, coordinated by the Instituto Interuniversitario López Piñero. It will be disseminated in the various undergraduate and postgraduate programmes of the Faculties of Science (Campus Burjassot), Humanities and Social Sciences (Campus Blasco Ibáñez and Campus Tarongers).
WORKS:
Q-0185 Colorímetre Leitz-Duboscq
Q-0182 Colorímetre de Lange
F-0534 Espectroscopi de desviació constant
Q-0181 Espectroscopi
Q-0177 Refractòmetre
Q-0187 Refractòmetre
F-0531 Sacarímetre
Q-0055 Polarímetre
Q-0116 Balança analítica
Q-0008 Granatari
Q-0124 Balança de Westphal
Q-0004 Balança
Q-0094 Balança analítica d’un braç
Balança
Q-0140 Fotòmetre de flama
Q-0072 Espectrofotòmetre
Q-0118 Espectrofotòmetre d’ultravioleta i visible
Q-0073 Bufador
Q-0016 Ph-metre Beckman g-2000
Q-0139 Ph-metre model GS
Q-0066 model H2
Q-0092 Bomba Torricelli
Q-0093 Bomba dosificadora
F-610 Regla de càlcul
Q-0130 Oscil·loscopi
Q-0230 Piròmetre òptic
