Talk_Curry.doc

Secrets and Lies: On the troubled relationship between science and art
Originally delivered at the TwoTen Gallery, 23 July 2003
Revised for print 3–5 August 2003
Part Two: Jessica Curry

I’m Jessica and I am primarily a composer and sound artist. I read English Literature at university and then went on to a three year Postgraduate course in Screen Music at the National Film and Television School. While I was at the film school I gradually developed an interest in music and sound technology. I’m a classically trained musician and had never used a computer or a sampler to make music, and technology really revolutionized my practice and pushed me in a completely different career direction.

My practice now is very diverse and this reflects my personality! My work fuses traditional instruments and orchestration with innovative applications of digital technology and often deals with enabling people to perceive everyday situations, sounds and objects in a new way. Although my work is experimental in nature, it is very important to my working practice to keep the concepts of audience, engagement and communication in mind. My work tends to be contemplative in nature; it is sometimes politicized in theme but I like to let the audience form their own conclusions.

I did a residency a couple of years ago that led me to thinking about the presentation of my sound work in a very different way. I was facing the problem, and continue to face it, that my music doesn’t fit in with the current trend of the majority of contemporary sound work, which is often harsh, industrial and often lacking an emotional depth. As a classically trained composer I don’t start off by asking what technology can do, but how the technology can build and develop on existing and generic musical and compositional rules to create new forms – how it can create beautiful, organic, or magical soundscapes.

During this residency I was contracted to make an audio-tactile installation. To me, the physical installation was less important than the sound, in that it was an environment in which to experience the aural element, i.e. the installation supported the sound, rather than the conventional way of producing sound to support visuals. It seemed to me a positive and interesting way to overcome the problems that a sound artist often faces, i.e. the siting of their work. With this ethos in mind Dan and I set about creating ‘The Secret of Life’.

Dan and I are married and we had never collaborated on an artwork before. Potentially this could have been a disastrous experience but it actually worked incredibly well. Collaboration is always a big buzzword on the art scene, but in the past I have found that it brings with it more problems than benefits. I believe that in order to create something meaningful it’s necessary to have a very strong, personal vision and it’s difficult to align that with someone else’s personality and ideas. There are also often very practical issues that arise from collaboration- who ends up doing more work, who is more organized and who ends up doing the donkey work? There was no bullshit between me and Dan and intellectually and creatively we spur each other on. In some ways, making ‘The Secret of Life’ became as much of an intellectual challenge as a creative one, but I’ll come back to this a bit later.

If I’m honest, the visual element of the piece was originally devised in order to make the piece more palatable to the curator. I knew that it probably didn’t stand a chance if I submitted a proposal that just included sound and music. I am fascinated, if not dismayed, by curators and managers continuing visual bias and their inability to accept sound as an art form in its own right. I have never been to an exhibition where I have sat in a darkened room and simply experienced sound. I am working towards making this happen, but I feel we’re quite a long way off yet. It was telling that when the Hayward Gallery showed ‘Sonic Boom’ in 2000, which was supposed to be the first major UK exhibition of sound art, pretty much all of the work was installative and relied on major visual elements.

Having said that, I’m so glad that we incorporated the visual element into the work as I think it adds a lot to the final piece and I don’t think that we would have been able to make the statement that we have done if the piece was purely sound-based.

The process of making the work came about when we saw a call for proposals for the exhibition in Artists Newsletter. It stated that the artist could choose any of the four scientists, Watson, Crick, Franklin or Wilkins to base their work on. It was one of those times that seemed incredibly serendipitous as I had heard a radio programme about Rosalind Franklin a couple of weeks before so I knew immediately which scientist I was interested in. Often artists apply for anything that will afford them the opportunity to make a piece of work, whether it interests them or not, but I really try not to do that, as I think it always shows in the final work. As Dan has already talked about, the inter-relationship between science and art fascinates both of us and this was in many ways an ideal brief for the two of us.

In our original proposal we stated that ‘The Secret of Life’ would be an artwork about layers, hidden codes, and the complex structures, equations and histories that lie beneath the surface. In fact we stayed exactly with this statement. It was our interest in Franklin the person that caused quite a few fireworks between us and Wellcome. Our original copy was very hostile towards the other scientists, as, the more we read, the angrier we became about the way in which Franklin had been treated. Copy bounced backward and forward, and basically we were told that what we had written was unpublishable and would not be used by Wellcome if we didn’t change it. This was a very difficult time in the process and raised a lot of questions for us, as no artist likes to feel that they are being censored. The biggest issue that this raised was “does art have a duty to ensure that what is communicated is factual and correct?” This was heightened by the fact that we were dealing with real people, some of whom are still alive. The film A Beautiful Mind was slated by some critics for not dealing with some aspects of John Nash’s life, namely his bisexuality. Should the film-maker have included this merely on the basis that it was ’factually’ correct, or is it okay for him to leave it out because it doesn’t fit in with the dramatic story that he is trying to tell? When we asked the Novartis Foundation for permission to use Franklin’s photograph, they would not release it until we had stated very clearly our reasons for wanting the photo and what we intended to do with it. I admired this stance, as their decision wasn’t motivated by money, but by a sense of responsibility, both to Franklin’s family, and her place in history. But immediately we get into problems about what is factual, what is correct. I spent long enough at film school to know that documentary isn’t truth, photography isn’t truth, because as soon as you interpret a moment, it changes it forever.

I tend to tie myself up in knots when I think about this for too long. I abhor any kind of censorship but understand why people want to protect reputations and not rock the boat. In the end I’m with Voltaire, who said, “I disapprove of what you say, but will defend to the death your right to say it.”
Artists are, by nature, (and maybe I’m buying into the stereotype that Dan has just been talking about) tub-thumping, trouble stirring, rabble rousing, free thinkers. This raises the issue of artists working within organizations – their remits are entirely different. At some points it felt very much like a ‘them and us’ situation. Here is an email that Dan sent to me at one point in the copy editing process.
OK – see what you think of this – I've tried to tone down the 'f**k
you' style but keep the political point in, plus splice in a bit more
about the work itself from the original copy. Hopefully it retains
the integrity of our stance whilst being something that will clear
the censors - I've tried to intellectualize the debate about fact vs
legend without going into a head-on battle. I don't think there's
anything in it that will be massively contentious for Wellcome, but
hopefully it suggests some very pointed questions about Watson et al.
Dunno really. Let me know what ya think!

There were endless ones like this but it is telling that I have deleted many of them as they were just too painful to keep at the time. This may sound melodramatic, but when art is what you do, how you express yourself to the world, then it really, really matters.

In the end, we came to a truce with Wellcome and I think that we made a better piece of work because of these discussions. It forced us to get past our anger, perhaps the most obvious and therefore least interesting emotion regarding Franklin, and enabled us to see her as a person in her own right.

The work deals with the history and iconography of Rosalind Franklin, whose X-ray diffraction photographs were instrumental in the discovery of the structure of DNA, yet who for many years received little credit for her involvement. The most immediate illustration of this was the Nobel Prize, awarded after her death to the other three key scientists involved. They neglected to credit her in their acceptance speeches. In fact, Franklin’s only major visibility for some time was the grossly unfair caricature James Watson presented in his account of the discovery, Double Helix.

Franklin was a truly extraordinary individual, who deserves far more recognition than either Watson, or her subsequent incarnation as feminist martyr affords her. In ‘The Secret of Life’, we aimed to question the relationship between history – especially non-immediately apparent history – and representation through media. During the course of our research, it was obvious how many different groups and agendas claimed Franklin as their own and, equally, how little was frequently broadcast about her identity or achievements outside the DNA debate. Just as DNA requires representation to understand, and the battles surrounding ownership or power of these representations continue (rather than battling for the ownership of the object itself); so Franklin now exists as a mediated figure, one whose history always remains in tension between different objectives and groups. In this way, the artwork explicitly refers to the difficult relationship between past/actual reality and the constant movement and rappropriation of media reality.

I used sound and music to create a multi-sensory experience of DNA, a subject which is usually represented by silent images. The audio element uses numbers and rules derived from the hidden codes of the genetic alphabet to build an organic composition that can be experienced without referring to its inner nature. The rules remain buried: they exist invisibly within the music yet are integral to its form.

The sample “Life is the shape it is for a reason…” is taken from Life Story: A Double Helix, a BBC film about the discovery of DNA where Rosalind Franklin is played by Juliet Stevenson. This blending of fact and fiction engages with the complex questions of truth, history and ownership of public identity.

The sculptural element is suggestive of the shape of the double helix, yet in order to see this shape, the work must be viewed from above – a deliberately inaccessible perspective. The sculpture is made up of long strips of sandblasted Perspex that hang from the ceiling. These form the curved S-shape and are semi-opaque so that one can see occasional shadows of the other visitors through the sculpture. Projected onto this are two animations. The first depicts rotating bands of DNA sequencing falling like rain. Every two minutes Franklin’s face appears in a ghostly way and quickly falls away again. The second animation combines her famous X-ray diffraction photograph with quotes about and by her. These include:
“Science and everyday life cannot and should not be separated.” Rosalind Franklin.
“Scientist: her work on viruses was of lasting benefit to mankind.” Franklin’s epitaph.
“I don’t know what you see in Ros; you know she’s a Jew don’t you?”
Anonymous Cambridge student to Rosalind’s best friend.
“All her life Rosalind knew exactly where she was going.” Muriel Franklin, Rosalind’s mother.

We wanted to create a reflective space where the un-immediate slowly reveals itself, a space where your curiosity is aroused to discover more about an extraordinary scientist, her work and her life.

The Wellcome Trust: TwoTen Gallery Talk on 23 July 2003
Secrets and Lies: On the troubled relationship between science and art
Part Two: Jessica Curry