Bigger and bulkier than ever, the art omnibus formerly called “Pacific Standard Time,” now known by the snappier “PST,” is making its once-every-several-years appearance across Southern California this fall. Bankrolled by the Getty Foundation and centered in Los Angeles, the $20.4 million initiative is made up of more than 70 exhibitions, organized by museums and nonprofit spaces large and small, and gathered, with varying degrees of cogency, under a single thematic banner: “PST ART: Art & Science Collide.”
The event’s two former editions were very much about place. The first, in 2011, revisited art made in and around Los Angeles from 1945 to 1980; the second, in 2017, surveyed Latino and Latin American art and culture from the region. The current version, which runs through Feb. 16, 2025, departs from this geographically grounded model, at a cost. Aside from nods toward Southern California’s history as a hub of the film and aerospace industries, much of the new PST lineup features generalist global themes — the environment, A.I., the Future — and as a result the event, as whole, feels shapeless and adrift.
The attempt to infuse a sense of coherence by injecting some drama into its title is no help. In most of the individual offerings we find art and science meshing, not clashing. But meshing can generate its own drama. And even if the cumulative effect of PST 2024 is sketchy, of the more than two dozen offerings I sampled a strong handful make the trip worthwhile.
Art, Science and Light
Unsurprisingly, given the deep financial and scholarly resources supporting PST, one of its most impressive entries is a jewel-box historical show organized by the J. Paul Getty Museum and magisterially installed in its Brentwood citadel. Titled “Lumen: The Art and Science of Light,” it spans Western Europe’s so-called Long Middle Ages (roughly 800-1600 A.D.), when three sharp-elbowed religions — Christianity, Judaism and Islam — briefly and uneasily coexisted, and boundaries between science and religion, the material and the spiritual, were fluid.
Light, as presented here, was both a mysterious material phenomenon and an existentially loaded metaphor. Physically, optically, it let us measure time and distance, and see in the dark. Symbolically, it directed attention to the ineffable, made it imaginable.
The Getty display gives a sense of the spectrum. Star-charting astrolabes, filigreed with silver and Eucharistic chalices cast from gold, share a space. Gilt-painted menorahs and planetary forms gleam from the pages of Hebrew Bibles and astronomical texts. The immense Byzantine chandelier seen here would have transformed a church into a blazing lamp. An Islamic architectural sculpture called a muqarnas, a miracle of geometric design and organic hand-carving, would have produced, in a mosque or a palace, a wall-dissolving play of shadow and light.
In a smart move, the Getty added contemporary art to the mix. In the gallery with the 15th-century muqarnas is an updated version, this one constructed from mirrors by the luminous Iranian artist Monir Shahroudry Farmanfarmaian (1927-2019). And the many manuscript images of cosmic spheres are echoed in an abstract sculpture in the form of a large light-channeling lens, made in 1971 by Fred Eversley, an aerospace engineer turned artist.
“Lumen” is a deluxe dazzler, and no other PST 2024 show ventures anywhere near the historical terrain it covers, except one, the Museum of Jurassic Technology. Tucked away on a low-rise block in Culver City, this minute and unworldly wonder devoted to esoteric art and art makers, real and fictional — here art, science and credibility collide — is one of my L.A. favorites. And only here would I expect to find something like “A Veiled Gazelle: Intimations of the Infinite and Eternal — Islamic Geometries of Medieval al-Andalus.”
The museum, founded in 1988, has recently added a mite more gallery space devoted to a walk-in visual essay on the history, meaning and beauty of Islamic architecture as it flowered in Muslim-occupied medieval Spain. Several freshly made versions of muqarnas introduce a vaulted hall with an inlaid wood ceiling, a stone mosaic floor and carved-stucco walls. As in Islamic design, geometric precision is the language spoken: you get to God through Math.
The Climate Crisis
I expected that, in the present alertness to environmental crisis, the subject of ecology would feature prominently in this PST, and it does. It’s the spur for another polished institutional show, “Storm Cloud: Picturing the Origins of Our Climate Crisis” at the Huntington Library, Art Museum and Botanical Gardens in San Marino.
Combining art and archival material, the show tells the story of the dawning awareness in late-18th-century England of a catastrophe in progress, read in the smoke-choked skies of industrial England by alert cloud-watchers like John Ruskin. Conservationist anxiety spread to America, showing up in the admonitory landscapes of Thomas Cole and the writing of Henry David Thoreau, whose rustic hiking stick, on loan from the Concord Museum, is here. And we see the damage continuing, unheeded, into the early 20th century in panoramic photos of a Los Angeles that had become a vast and active oil field. The exhibition is ideally scaled, nuanced in its thinking, and comes with a superb catalog.
A contemporary group show called “Breath(e): Toward Climate and Social Justice” at the Hammer Museum tackles and updates the same theme, but with less success. Its title suggests a spirit of purposeful urgency that the exhibition doesn’t convey — again, a weakness of this PST edition as a whole.
Yet there’s stirring work here. Brandon Ballengée’s portraits of Pacific Ocean marine animals, painted with fuel oil, memorialize species all but snuffed out by oil spills. A suspended sculpture of a miniature Vietnam village by Tiffany Chung is an elegiac response to the reality, advanced by climate studies, that her birth land is at risk of submersion. Beeswax sculptures by the artist-apiarist Garnett Puett are collaborations with teams of other “artists,” all now endangered: namely, a colony of winged pollinator bees working away behind glass in the gallery.
But the most moving example of eco-art — one also with an interspecies component — is found elsewhere, in a small survey called “Beatriz da Costa: (un)disciplinary tactics,” organized by Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions (LACE) at the Los Angeles Municipal Art Gallery. Da Costa was born in Berlin, but spent much of her adult life working as a discipline-bridging professor of studio art, electrical engineering and computer science at the University of California, Irvine.
LACE’s tenderly conceived retrospective documents her environmental projects, including the best known one, “PigeonBlog.” For this, da Costa collaborated — that’s how she saw it — with a flock of homing pigeons, fitting the birds with tiny nylon backpacks carrying carbon dioxide monitors that recorded air pollution levels, as the birds flew, throughout economically disparate Los Angeles neighborhoods. (A restaging of “PigeonBlog” will take place in the city on Nov. 16.)
She made her final work, a 2012 video piece called “Dying for the Other,” while she was receiving experimental treatment for breast cancer. We see images of her, debilitated by therapy and disease, in a hospital, paired with images of laboratory mice being injected with cells of the same kind of cancer da Costa suffered from, and that took her life at 38.
Local History: Made in L.A.
Shows thoroughly centered in Los Angeles are few in this year’s edition. One is a solo cooked up by an out-of-towner, the New York-based conceptualist Mark Dion. After a recent residency at La Brea Tar Pits, where he helped dig up, dust and identity fossil remains, he put together a witty installation in this on-site museum. As if to collapse Pleistocene and the (seemingly inevitable) Anthropocene extinctions of the current geological age, he combines relics from the Pits with litter from nearby city streets, and tags chart-like drawings of fossil creatures with the names of Los Angeles stars: Walt Disney, Joan Didion, Ed Ruscha, Cher.
The celebrity names that weave through a different show, “Sci-Fi, Magick, Queer LA: Sexual Science and the Imagi-Nation,” are, for the most part, more arcane. This exhibition — on view at the USC Fisher Museum of Art, and organized by ONE Archives at the USC Libraries, one of the world’s largest repositories of L.G.B.T.Q. materials — documents a little-studied local underground that flourished from the 1930s to the 1960s. Bringing together elements of homophile culture, niche spiritualities and Space Age futurism, it generated a “secret society” vibe that offered a sense of safety for certain societal nonconformists in a repressive time, and paved the way for the liberation movements, gay and otherwise, of the 1960s.
A few of the associated personalities (Kenneth Anger, Arthur C. Clarke, Anaïs Nin, and L. Ron Hubbard of Scientology fame) are familiar. Others like Jack Parsons — a devout occultist and a self-taught rocket scientist at Caltech’s (and now NASA’s) Jet Propulsion Laboratory — are not. (Married to the painter Marjorie Cameron, he died in an unexplained explosion in his home lab.) Much of the show’s visual matter — mystical paintings, ritual costumes, sexology journals, sci-fi fanzines — has been off practically everyone’s radar for decades. Altogether it makes for a trippy package.
Liftoff
Finally, the aerospace industry itself, a natural subject for this PST, gets attention in an exhibition jointly organized by the Jet Propulsion Lab and the city of Glendale, Calif., where the show is installed in a public library. Titled “Blended Worlds: Experiments in Interplanetary Imagination,” and produced by 11 artists working with the lab’s engineers, it’s a genuine art-science fusion, though that’s no guarantee of excitement, or isn’t in this case, where the ideas feel a bit too New Agey, the forms a little too bland.
The exception is a kinetic sculpture by the artist David Bowen, who worked with Rishi Verma, a data systems specialist at J.P.L. Titled “Tele-Present Wind,” it doesn’t look like much: a sculptural installation composed of dozens of six-feet-tall shoots of grasslike vegetation, with the shoots attached upright to small motorized bases which make them shiver and sway in roughly synced rhythm. That’s the art part. The science part lies in the fact that the rhythm is created by motion-collecting sensors in the bases programmed to pick up the movement of distant wind from the surface of Mars, more than 100 million miles away. The resulting piece may represent only a minor pirouette for mankind. But it’s nice to see, thanks to science, art joining the dance of the spheres.
The post 7 Shows That Make This Art Festival Worth the Trip to California appeared first on New York Times.
