Echoes of Atomic Wind

Abstract

Madame Curie By Jennifer Steinkamp Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego, California January 23-June 19, 2011 In her latest large-scale animation titled Madame Curie, artist Jennifer Steinkamp mobilizes a complex narrative of art, innovation, triumph, and disaster. She uses new media to tell old stories, alluding to pain through pacific movement, and tasking science to illustrate her poetry. In effect, virtually every part of this monumental seven-channel video installation implies its opposite, opening up an exegetic space of reflection and unease. In the end it is the animated sway of the flowers, at once beautiful and foreboding, in which the installation's overarching narrative is revealed. Drawing from some forty flowers mentioned in Eve Curie's biography of her mother Marie, Steinkamp digitally renders a diverse floral ecosystem over an infinitely non-descript black background. In four-and-a-half-minute loops, she animates this convoluted network of flower petals, stems, and leaves in varying shapes and contrasting speeds to create a rather dizzying sense of deep space. The immersive quality of the large projections, combined with a vast gallery floor intentionally emptied of any object or furniture, intensifies the viewers' awareness of their own bodily presence in, and movement through, the space. This corporal engagement is what raises the piece's status from mere video projection to full-scale installation. Its aesthetic foundation is the generation of these spatial layers within both the projected surface itself and the gallery's physical environment. Furthermore, by engineering a situation in which bodies move within a cavernous yet enclosed space, Steinkamp provides an echo of atomic structures that enriches the installation's narrative arc. For the viewer who knows nothing about Marie Curie or the artist, the installation with its dominance of the wide-open 4,500-square-foot gallery and site-specific precision--is a spectacular combination of technological mastery and aesthetic grace. However, the story of Marie Curie and its engagement by Steinkamp (an acclaimed contributor to the field of time-based digital video) adds dimensions to this piece worthy of special consideration. By not making explicit the facts of Marie Curie's pioneering career, Steinkamp allows the unacquainted viewer to walk away without the slightest knowledge of Curie's game-changing contributions to the energy of the modern world. To the contrary, viewers may leave with the simple notion that the installation is about some anonymous Madame and her feminine floral fancies. In the context of the groundbreaking life of Marie Curie, this notion provides a contradiction crucial to the unraveling of the exhibition's overall narrative. To absorb Madame, Curie in its totality, we must understand not only Marie Curie's astounding contributions to science and her pioneering role as a female in that field, but also the gravity of Curie's link to modern warfare's deployment of nuclear energy, where her discoveries in radiation played a crucial role. This connection shows Curie's hand, however hijacked, in one of human history's most atrocious moments. …