Crossing Over: Where Art and Science Meet. . - Art Meets Science - book review

Whole Earth, Spring, 2002 by Lulu Winslow

Stephen Jay Gould and Rosamond Wolff Purcell 2000; 158 pp. $27.50 Three Rivers Press

This is the third book-length collaboration between photographer/artist Rosamond Wolff Purcell and scientist/essayist extraordinaire Stephen Jay Gould (See Whole Earth, Fall 2000). They understand the symbiotic relationship of art and science. Artists rely on the structure provided by laws of kinetics and pattern and chemistry as much as on chance. Scientists rely on the accumulation of predictable, repeatable results as well as the gigantic, nonlinear, crazy-seeming, leap of faith "AHA!" experiences we usually attribute to artists. This collaboration embodies the crossing over between art and science. Purcell's photographs are not just illustrations for Gould's essays. But, neither, as Gould writes, are the essays "an explanation or explication of Rosamond Purcell's photographs, but rather a musing (perhaps, on occasion, amusing as well) upon the common theme of a truly joint effort."

The photographs and accompanying essays examine everything from Mardi Gras parades of skeletons to old books found in junkyards, weathered by time and turned into nests by opportunistic wildlife. Purcell's juxtapositions are sometimes whimsical, and her whimsicality often calls forth new insights about the things themselves. Gould contributes his vast knowledge of life, literature, history, and science, enhanced by his capacity for making surprising connections. --Lulu Winslow

"The trade secret of the literary essayist fits the photographs of this book particularly well: Love, treasure, and exemplify the little details in all their intricate fascination, but not for themselves alone (or you will be buried by the two adjectival curses of academic failure and narrowness: arcane and vacuous). Instead, use those lovely details to exemplify, in a more explicit mote of concrete that can carry a general message with light and lightness, the great issues of matter and meaning that only a pompous fool would attack head on. (No one should ever write a tendentious and general essay about the meaning of human distinctiveness, but a picture of Fred Astaire next to an ape [right] in similar pose conveys both the challenge and the reality with accessible definition, and maybe even with requisite modesty.)

"Intellectual life should not be construed as two cultures of science and humanities at war, or even at variance. Human culture arose from the material substrate of a complex brain; and science and art meld in continuity.