IT WAS A CLEAR DAY, the kind where you can see forever. Especially if you’re standing on the airy terrace of Los Angeles’s Getty Center one mid-September morning. I’m here for the launch of the third iteration of Getty’s “Pacific Standard Time” program, newly rebranded into the far more keyword-searchable PST ART. The 900-foot elevation, with its sweeping god’s-eye view, prompts a little excavation through a few layers of history. I’m here because, within his own lifetime, founding philanthropist J. Paul Getty pulled off some rare alchemy: He worked out how to turn Oil into Art. His first big oil strike was in Muskogee, Oklahoma, in 1916; by 1954, the prospector turned aesthete had opened a part of his Malibu home as a museum to showcase his collection of art and antiquities. Twenty years later, the cliffside Getty Villa—a mirror re-creation of a palace destroyed by the eruption of Vesuvius—had been built to provide a permanent home for his now-immense hoard. Getty died in 1976, never seeing his vision completed, but he’s buried up there, forever overlooking the wide blue Pacific.
Getty’s own legacy perhaps provides the ur-narrative behind the powerful, pertinent theme chosen for PST’s 2024–25 edition: “Art & Science Collide.” As the pace of technology races past our abilities to comprehend it, art can communicate scientific ideas more effectively than any academic paper. With the Getty Foundation disbursing $20 million worth of grant funding to more than seventy institutions, eight hundred artists, and scores of galleries, they’ve generated a zone of cultural collision extending far beyond L.A., encompassing Southern California from Santa Barbara to Orange County, San Diego, and into the Inland Empire. There’s nothing quite as big as this, anywhere. Paging through the guide booklet, SoCal spreads out before me like a Pynchon novel adapted into Choose Your Own Adventure format: I’m going to be ricocheting all over the map on a wild voyage of discovery. To attempt to have any kind of meaningful encounter with months of programming in just under a week, there’s no (Pacific Standard) time to lose.
On a Copernican solar system model, the Getty Center is the sun, around which radiate the globes, moons, and meteors of PST ART, spiraling together through the galaxy. Here, I start at “Lumen: The Art of Science and Light,” which brings precious yet eminently practical historical objects face to face with contemporary treasures. Intricate astrolabes once held by medieval navigators as they sailed by the stars, an array of pendulous Byzantine choros, and a gilded Giotto are all evidence of the ingenious wisdom possessed long before electronics or even electricity. The juxtapositions are exquisite: The concave curves of a Fred Eversley parabolic lens from 1971 refract a rock crystal Crucifixion intaglio etched in the mid-ninth century. In the West Pavilion, the complementary “Abstracted Light: Experimental Photography” and “Sculpting with Light: Contemporary Artists and Holography” curations feature dazzling offerings from photogram pioneers as well as holograms by contemporary iconoclast Deanna Lawson. Getty Research Institute’s “Sensing the Future: Experiments in Art and Technology” evaluates the avant-garde theatrical activism of 1960s collective E.A.T. The disparate group of Bell Labs engineers, artists, and musicians (including John Cage and Robert Rauschenberg) creatively co-opted bleeding-edge military-industrial technologies like wireless FM transmission and sound-motion sensors. Grainy 1966 footage of Lucinda Childs swinging buckets on ropes through Doppler sonar beams—the buckets are her dancers—delights. I’ve just started my PST tour of duty, and my mind is already blown.
But I have many miles to go before I sleep. L.A’s infamously circuitous highways lead me down from Getty Center’s lofty hilltop and across town to the sylvan ridge of Griffith Park, where the Autry Museum’s “Out of Site: Survey Science and the Hidden Midwest” drops me behind the scenes of nuclear development on the North American continent. From penumbral uranium mine to missile-test ground zero, the softly lit and darkly textured walls of the exhibition design make me feel like I’ve cracked the code to some top-secret government bunker. Nancy Baker Cahill’s Mushroom Cloud is an outdoor work accessible by scanning a QR code. Made visible via the 4th Wall app, the augmented-reality apparition gives rise to a billowing blast cloud that engulfs the park’s trees, followed by tendrils of Mycelium hyphae that branch out to obliterate the sky. I get it, it’s a neat double entendre—the atomic vs. the organic mushroom, with the horror of man-made annihilation redeemed by nature’s rebirth. Even so, it’s a harrowing scene that no one would ever want to see over the city they live in—or any city, for that matter.
So when I arrive at Ryoji Ikeda’s point of no return at the Hammer Museum’s “Breath(e): Toward Climate and Social Justice,” I’m absolutely ready for catharsis. Stepping inside a strobing chamber, a standoff between a klieg light and a black hole wipes my mind and retinas clean of all previous images before I proceed. The show is all about evoking sensation; I must overcome primal fears to push myself through the thick curtains to experience the disquieting “apisculpture” of Garnett Puett. He’s somehow corralled a gang of bees into hard labor; enclosed in an elevated glass tank, they are driven by instinct to use their natural secretions to very slowly build a sculpture out of honeycomb. I can still feel the heat prickling on my skin as my eyes adjusted to the room’s deep red darkness, hyper alert to the gossamer caress of any escaped bee.
In contrast, a visit to “Earth Skin” by Lita Albuquerque at Michael Kohn Gallery delivers immediate calm. On the walls, large, gesturally painted panels in the artist’s signature ultramarine blue pigment seem to float over the gallery floor, spread with a one-millimeter thickness of decomposed granite. I catch up with Albuquerque during the restaging of her work of Land art from 1978, Malibu Line, now carved into the same cloud-skimming plateau where 2018’s raging wildfires incinerated her home, which is currently being re-built. Lita tells me: “It’s about defending the fragility of that one-millimeter layer. It becomes a sacred thing, whether it’s the earth or a painting.”
What would a functional, science-positive future society actually look like? I find out at “Views of Planet City” at the Pacific Design Center Gallery. Planet City concept originator and lead curator Liam Young has inspired his SCI-Arc faculty team to join forces to present a speculative environment in visionary detail. In this elaborate scenario, humans have ceded most of the planet to nature, and technology keeps the ten billion remaining humans alive in one culturally syncretic megapolis. Ethical science has won, eradicating sprawling suburban tracts in favor of limitless upward density. There’s enough food for all, and we celebrate 365 festivals—hybridized updates of formerly regional ethnic celebrations—one for each day of the year. A standout within the exhibition is Jennifer Chen’s Pink Earth. The lyrical film repurposes imagery from the raw surveillance data collected by sun-synchronous Landsat and Sentinel satellites to reconstruct a traveler’s journey from the abandoned territories toward the safe haven of Planet City. Chen explains: “When you see the world as a whole from above, like astronauts on a superstation do, you gain an entirely new perspective and perhaps a new emotional engagement with it. Satellites are machines . . . but they might imagine these stories and be able to read the transformations that may be going on on Earth.”
These unsleeping satellites would have clocked that Jeffrey Deitch held the buzziest, busiest evening opening of the week. “Post Human” is a reboot of the gallerist’s milestone 1992–93 exhibition in which a slew of young artists reacted to the disintegration of the Real through (as Deitch writes) “an acceptance of the multiplicity of reality models and the embrace of artificiality.” Retaining many of the original names, the concept has been infused with several units of new blood for 2024. The curiosity that these evolved forms aroused in the currently human was keen. Never have I seen a sculpture show that drew people in like this: Visitors were leaning over extended limbs, peering through orifices, or (in the case of Takashi Murakami’s 3 Meter Girl) ducking under augmented buttocks. As is customary since Deitch purchased Cary Grant’s elegant former bachelor pad, there was a post-show gravitation up to the contemporary-art-stuffed mansion. Artists and friends at the party were agog as performer Nina pushed the limits of human flesh with her contortionist and fire-eating displays. In the garage at the far end of the pool, I catch a glimpse of a car with a vanity plate that reads “MAN RAY.”
Which made the appearance of an actual work from the Surrealist within Palm Springs Art Museum’s “Particles and Waves: Southern California Abstraction and Science, 1945–1990” quite magical. Man Ray’s Shakespearean Equation: King Lear, 1948, was painted when he lived in Hollywood, based on mathematical models he had crafted in the 1930s. The neutral-tone oil-on-canvas piece looks out upon an array of significant works by Californian Light and Space luminaries including Larry Bell, Dewain Valentine, and James Turrell, alongside those from scientists whose discoveries triggered key technological advances in the postwar era. Eversley fits into both categories, with his career as a NASA aerospace engineer generating a repertoire of out-of-this-world techniques. His transparent circlet of rose light, shown here, calls all the way back to the geometry of Piero della Francesca’s lucent Renaissance halos.
Back in the city, Cai Guo-Qiang’s “WE ARE” daytime fireworks performance was a show designed to be felt by everybody. Held in—and over—the Los Angeles Coliseum, it was intended to be the “opening ceremony” of PST. Framed as a five-act Shakespearean drama, the Chinese artist’s display used algorithmically programmed drones to control patterns of organic pigment and smoke for a precisely calibrated bombardment of celestial beauty and Promethean parable. With Cai’s shout of “Three, two, one—FIRE” setting off each round, the detonations being shot over us felt very much like being shot at. During the finale, the artist turned the stadium into a war zone as relentless explosions and crystalline spark-showers circled the crowd from above. Many invitees were upset to have been so deliberately . . . shaken up. But after the smoke cleared, my first thought was that J. Paul Getty—who in his younger years was unafraid to descend into the mine shaft amid dynamite and drill, who built a museum on a mountain using materials pulled from under a volcano’s ashes—would have loved it.
Being a part of this fierce, unforgettable ritual of fire, sound, and science was something I’m glad I experienced live, even if I was coughing up particulates for days. Because artists are here to disturb the peace. To disturb even the institutions that commission them. It’s part of the DNA of this place, where residents accept living under perpetual threat of earthquake, forest fire, or high-speed chase.
Art isn’t always pretty. It can hurt. The incendiary “opening ceremony” wasn’t the only collision that hurt this week. Many of the heavy concepts contained in the shows I saw have far-reaching aftereffects. The “art vs. science” trope inherently provokes content that confronts and unsettles. It exposes systems of control, incites confusion about your place on a planet soon to be ruled by automated technology; potential apocalypse hovers behind every image. Even the lo-fi, nature-preservation-based offerings are alarming, as they make you realize how much has already been lost. But when you ask for knowledge bombs, don’t be upset when they drop. The PST ART trip is vast, exhilarating, and a hell of a way to plot a course across SoCal. For now, I’ve maxed out my sensory receptors, and my cerebral cortex is in extreme synaptic overload. Despite/because of this intensity, I wholeheartedly recommend seeing as much as you can of PST. Even if it gives you PTSD. Sometimes on a clear day, you can see a little too far.
PST ART: “Art & Science Collide” is presented by Getty throughout Los Angeles and Southern California from September 2024 into 2025.
