Review: Artists comment on global warming in Coral Reef exhibit
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One of the most fascinating, wide-reaching contemporary artworks/projects I've come across is at the Andy Warhol Museum, and anyone -- grandmother, fine arts major, crafter, theoretical mathematician -- who knows how to crochet may become a part of it.
Hand-made ocean creatures are part of the "Crochet Hyperbolic Coral Reef" project.Click photo for larger image.
The "Crochet Hyperbolic Coral Reef" is at the North Side museum only through June 17, but it's developing a global grass-roots following, and its life span has just begun.
The "Reef" is the creation of Margaret and Christine Wertheim, twin sisters and natives of Australia who now live in Los Angeles. It's part of the Warhol's "6 BILLION PERPS HELD HOSTAGE! Artists Address Global Warming," fitting into that exhibition because of the damage being done to coral reefs around the world by pollutants and climatic changes.
While the "Reef" has been on display at the museum, there's been a steady rise in the amount of blogging about the exhibition and the piece itself, says Rick Armstrong, Warhol communications manager.
And contributions to the growing work keep arriving at its home base, the Institute For Figuring in Los Angeles. Crocheted coral has come from California, New York, Oregon, England and Australia, the latter a pleasant surprise to the sisters who hadn't previously met any of the crocheters from their native country. More corals are expected soon from Canada, Boston and Seattle.
The Wertheims' personal interest is Australia's famed Great Barrier Reef, which they first became enthralled by when they were children.
That ecosystem has suffered serious damage in the past three decades, much of it because of agricultural runoff, Margaret Wertheim said in a lecture at The Warhol in March.
Last month, a New York Times article headlined "Coral Is Dying. Can It Be Reborn?" cited biologist David E. Vaughan who said that 25 percent of the world's corals have been lost in the past 25 years and that 25 percent more are expected to die in the next decade or two. Vaughan is director of the Center for Coral Reef Research at the Mote Marine Laboratory in the Florida Keys, where scientists tend a coral nursery with plans to re-establish locally compatible species in nearby waters.
The "Reef" artwork was designed as an homage, with the hope that it would draw attention to the plight of corals around the world and act as a remembrance if they die out.
Wertheim began her talk with a discussion of the life cycle of a coral colony, which shares nutrients and engages in synchronous spawning, usually under a full moon. Marveling at how these primitive nerveless organisms know when to simultaneously engage in reproduction across thousands of miles of ocean, she said they're "a nice model for us -- communal, sharing, attuned to the cosmos."
The project, which has environmental, biological and aesthetic aspects, also involves higher math and feminism.
Both are anchored in a discovery a decade ago by mathematician Daina Taimina, who figured out how to make a long-elusive physical model of a hyperbolic plane. She did it using crochet hooks.
Since she made the first one, Taimina has been getting requests from all over to purchase them as teaching tools, and one has found its way to the Smithsonian collection of mathematical models.
Wertheim described hyperbolic space as "another kind of geometry" that could be envisioned as "the geometric opposite of a sphere. Spherical space is positively curved space, while hyperbolic space has negative curvature."
"A lot of marine organisms have hyperbolic structure," Wertheim said.
Aware of Taimina's discovery, the Wertheims, who grew up knitting and crocheting, decided to create "a woolly taxonomy," and soon found that "just as nature seems to have endless variations, the same is true of crocheted forms." When they think the variations have all been represented, they hold a workshop and someone comes up with something new.
"It's a kind of project in practical evolution," Wertheim said with a smile.
A particularly gratifying aspect of the project for the sisters is that contributions are being made by little ladies in the countryside as well as hip young urbanites.
"Middle-aged women who would never be taken seriously by the art world," Wertheim said. One of their chief contributors runs a sheep farm in Australia. Another is a former geneticist who did DNA analysis. One of the most recent is a middle-aged black woman who lives in the San Fernando Valley. The sisters came across her work -- a hyperbolic structure the woman had created on her own -- at an art fair. When asked how she came to make such a form, the woman answered "The Lord gave it to me. The Lord guided me."
The accomplishments of women are traditionally under-recognized in the scientific and art worlds, Wertheim said. "When I can get people like [these] into the Warhol, it is a feminist act."
The Institute For Figuring defines itself as "an organization dedicated to the poetic and aesthetic dimensions of science, mathematics and the technical arts," a catholic embrace of knowledge that positions it well for such a multifaceted, multinational endeavor.
"From the physics of snowflakes and the hyperbolic geometry of sea slugs, to the mathematics of paper folding, the tiling patterns of Islamic mosaics and graphical models of the human mind, the institute takes as its purview a complex ecology of figuring."
The "Reef" is only one of the concerns of the institute, as a troll through their well-developed Web site will reveal www.theiff.org/main.html.
A related project, the "Rubbish Vortex," comprising cut and knotted used plastic bags, is inspired by an accumulation of plastic in the Pacific, the result of natural current flow, that's now twice the size of Texas -- "the satanic plastic vortex twin to the coral reef," Wertheim dubbed it.
Along with instructions on how to submit to the "Reef," other entrees range from an interview with Shea Zellweger, who developed a visual language that he named the "Logic Alphabet," to an article on the "computational origami" of the late David Huffman, who was professor of computer sciences at University of California at Santa Cruz.
"This is technically my hobby project," Wertheim said, "but it is threatening to take over my life."
First Published June 5, 2007 6:36 pm
