A conversation between the three curators of the exhibition Lumen: The Art and Science of Light held at the Getty Museum from 10 September to 8 December 2024 as part of PST ART: Art and Science Collide. Colleagues look back on the planning, technical expertise, and creative collaboration that went into the making and mounting of the exhibition, illuminating the inspirations and surprises that arose along the way.
In 1977, the feminist art collective Mother Art staged a series of performances in laundromats across Los Angeles that highlighted women’s socially reproductive work inside and outside of the home. The project, titled Laundry Works, was subsequently assailed by politicians unhappy with the artwork’s use of public funds, triggering a debate that continued for years and involved commentators such as Ronald Reagan. Through analysis of archival documents, photographs, news articles, and original interviews with the artists, this article situates Laundry Works and the controversy that surrounded it within the late 1970s tax revolt and rise of neoliberalism in the United States. By performing in spaces associated with domestic labor, Mother Art explored the continuum between private care and public infrastructure, highlighting capitalism’s dependence on socially reproductive work, which is gendered, classed, and racialized in order to be rendered invisible and thus more easily exploited. Mother Art’s performances represent an important yet critically underexamined contribution to politicized second-wave feminist art that challenges gendered divisions of labor
In several completed works in the oeuvre of Swiss painter Ferdinand Hodler (1853–1918), including some of his most important pieces, there is an unusual phenomenon: Hodler ostentatiously displayed lines resulting from the use of sighting and transfer grids, as well as traces of other technical tools. Hodler’s enthusiasm for Renaissance art is revealed by numerous sources, including previously unpublished letters and accounts from his contemporaries. Hodler used the traces of instruments that were particularly prevalent in the early modern period, and the consequent impression of non finito, to position himself in the tradition of the European Renaissance canon. Through this idiosyncratic approach, Hodler’s work can be seen anew as a modern form of classicism that frees itself from narrative and anecdotal elements.
In March 1769, Jean Joseph Marie Amiot, S.J. (1718–93), the head of the French Jesuit mission in Beijing, penned a letter about the Jesuit artist Jean-Denis Attiret, S.J. (1702–68, Ch. Wang Zhicheng 王致誠). The Getty Research Institute holds a copy of this letter, which is the most comprehensive written source on Attiret and his decades in China serving the emperor Qianlong 乾隆 (r. 1736–95). Yet Amiot’s letter is unillustrated, establishing a pattern of studying Attiret more through written descriptions than through his paintings. This essay reintegrates the French and Chinese textual, visual, and material evidence of Attiret’s transcultural exchanges, thereby working in the same French Enlightenment modes in which Amiot wrote and Attiret painted. By reading Amiot’s letter against Attiret’s extant documentable oeuvre, the text acquires additional value for what it omits as much as for what it reveals.
This essay discusses the bronze zodiac animal head sculptures from the Yuanmingyuan (Garden of Perfect Brightness), which was looted and burned during the Second Opium War in 1860. Asking why these particular objects have gained international attention in repatriation debates, I argue that the zodiac sculptures garner their capacity for meaning in their forms as fragmented bodies, particularly as decapitated heads. I turn to the afterlives of the zodiac heads as sculptural reproductions, in which contemporary artists such as Ai Weiwei have copied the heads and transformed them for new audiences. Because the artistic reproductions are not exact copies, I argue that they should be considered acts of translation that move the conversation about cultural heritage into site-specific contexts and give voice to questions about heritage, identity, traditions, and global justice. The resulting artistic translations can elevate the originals, satirize them, challenge them, and even take on their own lives.
