Turning Science into Art: Conrad Shawcross | Brilliant Ideas Ep. 20

[Music] brilliant ideas powered by Hyundai Motor the Contemporary Art world is vibrant and booming as never before it's a 21st century phenomenon a global industry in its own right brilliant ideas looks at the artists at the heart of this artists with the unique power to astonish Challenge and Inspire in this program British sculptor con r [Music] shawcross that that tripod's off the ground and this one's off the ground we've got to bring it up British Artist Conrad shawcross has never been afraid to think big as proven by his latest astounding project dappled light of the Sun at Britain's royal Academy me in the past decade he's had the most meteoric career in British Contemporary Art and he's now the youngest member of the Royal [Music] Academy the good thing about an artist is you can just mix things up and just kind of use a bit of sort of alchemy put a bit of philosophy in with a bit of maths with a bit of art embracing ideas from geometry to philosophy physics PHS and metaphysics he creates works that are filled with Paradox and poetry you can't talk about Conrad shawcross at the moment without framing everything in terms of youthful Prodigy you need a bigger Hammer really I see Conrad as a sort of Leonardo Divinity of our time Leonardo was obsessed with how things were made how things operated the sort of mechanization of things I often think of him in terms of bark this extraordinary mathematical structure on which this wonderful sort of like Poetic lyricism hangs what Conrad does is he ignites a torrent of ideas about things that spill over Way Beyond what are conventionally called the confines of art Conrad is fearless and he has incredible energy but I sometimes think you know my goodness this young man he never [Music] [Applause] sleeps best known for his mysterious mechanical sculptures Conrad shawcross first came to prominence in 2004 with his brilliantly original work the nervous [Music] system I spent 4 months locked in my room building this crazy root machine wo a sort of Helix of cord into a rope very very slowly it was very much a journey of me trying to understand time rope and represent time cuz it's both linear and cyclical it's made up of all these composite strands what I made highlights the limit of language and the limit of perception and the way we describe time or the Reliance on metaphor to describe time I was described a bit as this s Heath Robinson Artist At the beginning which was not something I ever really liked because I was never trying to sort of play around with Whimsy I actually was I found it a bit upsetting cuz I wanted the machines to feel very rational but it was received incredibly well and so you bought it which is amazing it's the first time you sort of sell something there's nothing like it the sort of feeling of all that work paying off then all the press that followed and was fantastic and that sort of LED on to um yeah just the beginning of this sort of um Journey today Conrad works out of his studio in East London we're going to have to swing the other T out brought up in London the son of writers Marina Warner and William shawcross his childhood interests hinted at what was to come I was always taken to the theater into art galleries and the holidays would be arranged around these kind of pilgrimages to churches and Fresco and alar pieces and I remember going to sort of Pompei and to these sort of ruins and loving it but they were bit bit concerned that I didn't really read as much as them and my interests were much more in sort of building towers and structures in my room and taking things apart in the late 1990s Conrad attended the Ruskin School of Art part of Oxford University studying an art in a university was key to my practice in that we were sort of exposed to all these subjects and history and and English and poetry and Sciences so it wasn't art about art became very obsessed with how my car worked I think my teachers at the Ruskin were pretty confused I was sort of out in the yard just basically sort of being a mechanic and I think at the time they were like you can't repair your car as part of your course here at the science museum in London the rich array of objects and ideas had a profound influence on Conrad I would go to the Science Museum a lot when I was a kid my main memories of it were when I was um a student at the RAS and I would go there for inspiration particularly the maths Gallery it was this very 1960s realm of displays and there was a lot of very beautiful sort of Victorian models many of his Works pay tribute to pioneering figures from the past one of these is Charles Babbage the 19th century pooth who many regard as the pioneer of computing even though his own machine the Difference Engine was never completed one of the first s of historical reference works I made was called Paradigm Ed to the Difference Engine so I sort of put myself in the role of a bage like engineer who believed that they would if they built this thing somehow the world would change but the machine had no product it would just we weave and unweave and weave and unweave and just go around this infinite Loop the machine if you did turn it on would generally sort of slowly Crush itself so it was a static work but it was a bit tough because everyone was like oh you just couldn't get to work and I was like no this really was I was trying to be more a bit more sophisticated I was trying to not make this big spinny flashy thing I wanted to create a work about an idea and about failure Conrad's extraordinary mechanical sculptures soon caught the attention of one of the most influential figures in British art his work was so unusual and that it was informed by Science and Mathematics and it had a different different feel from anything else that I'd known before come on faster the take the point about Conrad is these distinctions don't exist for him whether it's mathematics or whether it's craft whether it's art whether it's science whether it's engineering or design he's working from the position that this is a unified discourse science and art were originally married to each other but there's been a period of Separation but I think there there's a momentum to get them back together again there is the sense that the artist is irrational and the scientist is rational and therefore they can't coexist but I don't think it is like that I think there's so much irrational or imaginative Loops of faith that the scientist has to made and so many artists whether it's Monet or whether it's Carl Andre they set themselves experiments they go back to the same lily pads they painted at different times of day but it's the same scene and they get beyond the real beyond the visible and trying to discover like all great artists it's interesting to know what's behind you know the ideas that somebody's exploring but I think what he's also able to do is make very beautiful objects so that one can just appreciate sort of formal and aesthetic qualities and it's that sort of layering where the more you dig the more you find out and the kind of more eloquent the work [Music] becomes Conrad shawcross is one of Britain's most most exciting Young Artists exploring the potent marriage of Art and Science his work has developed in diverse directions here at the new art center rash Court in Wiltshire he's putting the finishing touches to an exhibition of recent sculptures he made his name for these quite extraordinary mechanical objects and in the last couple of years he's been changing both the style of work and the m materials that he uses and I think it's the diversity of ideas it's the diversity of materials the diversity of forms that has really surprised me about Conrad the mathematics of Music in visual form has become a major theme within Conrad's work so this is the sort of famous Victorian harmonograph which became a sort of Victorian novelty at dinner parties in a toy essentially it was actually invented to study the um the vibrations in buildings when they were building the tube Network it was almost like a seismograph but it was a birth of cesia and the birth of visualizing musical mathematics you get these sort beautiful forms that AER from the [Music] noise this is a machine that I made maybe um 8 years ago and it's a variation on a harmonograph it's a bit Loos so everything's a bit more kind of wonky because I wasn't interested in just creating a pure fact simile of a cord because I think that the interesting thing is this sort of near miss or this uh discordancy Conrad uses the harmonograph to produce a drawing based on the mathematical ratios within a musical chord it's then transformed into three dimensions in his manifold sculpture in one way you could describe it as a picture of a cord falling into silence and it sits on this long stem but time is moving downwards and then there's a Decay factor it's a it's a journey towards [Music] silence they are visual silent realizations of an oral [Music] experience I think people will see different things in them and I don't mind really what that is I have to sort of surrender control all of it but hopefully they work on lots of different levels and it's the work that you you kind of lose control of once you've made it that are the most interesting and so that's when they sort of Shimmer or oscillate between different meanings and things you didn't even think of when you were conceiving it I think you don't have to know what you're making at the time for it to be a piece of [Music] art Conrad's exploration of music and form reached a new audience in a recent public [Music] commission Dage Park came about through this sort of tragic theft of this sculpture by Barbara headworth and it was stolen by scrap metal Merchants about 5 years ago so there was this public competition to create another art piece in the park and um I was lucky enough to win it they called three perpetual cords but essentially there's no Decay to them so they keep going at infinitum they've got this sense of never [Music] ending one of the things I'm most interested by in in hepworth's work is this idea of entering into sculpture and creating this immersion when I saw photographs of the there was so lots with kids with their heads through the the hole and even though this was quite a noral sculpture kids would run around it and use it as a object of play and I really wanted to sort of engage with that as an idea particularly because it was in a park it's been incredibly well received by people under the age of seven so it's become like a total CL climbing frame sensation if you get a kids running towards something you know you're doing something right [Music] Conrad's Works range from the playful to the highly conceptual in his ongoing adah project named after the Victorian mathematician adah Loveless who worked closely with Charles Babbage he uses a robot to create a new relationship between music and [Music] Mathematics I came up with this idea of creating a series of musical commissions they were basically getting musicians to respond to the robot so they would instead of the robot responding to the music the music would be subservient to the [Music] robot each musician would have to respond to this pre-existing piece of choreography which is basically the movement of the wand and the light bulb based on number crunching and sort of particular ratios we were taking off from AES work with [Music] babage lovely saw that a number could represent a note of Music a number could represent a letter of the alphabet and if you like that's what Conrad's doing Conrad is seeing that number has meaning and significance that goes beyond its quantity embracing everything from musical Theory to Quantum Mechanics Conrad's artistic output is becoming ever more ambitious but his latest project will be his most epic so [Music] [Applause] [Music] far over the past decade British sculptor Conrad shawcross has rapidly attracted International Renown with work shown everywhere from Tokyo to Tasmania Mexico to Paris here in London's Royal Academy Courtyard he's installing his most ambitious sculpture to date the dappled light of the Sun the dapp light sun is definitely one of the most epic things we've made it's actually been something that I conceive maybe nearly 10 years ago so it's it's been a long time coming and a long time to arrive there's 8,000 tan in it there's 12 man years of welding 25 tons of metal and it's a massive massive race to get it done the biggest challenge was the logistical challenge our Factory is 24,000 ft when these things were assembled in the factory they then Spilled Out into the yard so we ended up with thousands and thousands of these things marching across the workshop the triangles are laser profiled in a nested fashion like Russian dolls getting smaller and smaller and smaller 30,000 different triangles welded together into 8,000 tetrahedrons that was 20 M of Welding which took 10 men four months to produce okay can I have a bat please watch this the tetran in Greek times was used as the symbol of the atom it was the idea of the indivisible unit of matter one of the contradictions of this thing on this on its own is such a sort of symbol of order and rationale it seems so stable but together they are completely chaotic and scary he has like too many children can everyone just have a look up above see if anything's loose or anything's been left loose on the tripods we are on the fourth day of installing and we are now now about to raise the last Cloud we've got four in the air we're just sort of shuffling them about to find the right positions still need to come in a bit just it around a bit B this way keep going around this way we did all the safety checking so we have to hang on each one to put 150 kilos weight on each one which essentially is get two guys to hang on it and see if there's any movement or any worlds that seem to be compromised it's been a good process because we found like four or five welds that weren't as good as they should be that it's really important that one hangs straight you can't put it in tighten all these spanners you just keep catch your fingers so all my hands are totally um ripped up but um but this is part of the course I really love doing this bit of it it's really good fun after four days and nights of intensive work dappled light of the sun is complete when I first used the tetrahedron I was completely flued by the way they go together because it forms these tendrils and these kind of branches it never comes back on itself so once it starts to grow out just forms these plant-like forms so it feels like a plant in that the ones in the center are older and the ones on the edge are these sort of radicals that are younger so there's this sense of time within the structure you can see them as trees or fire or neural pathway all these sort of radiant ideas of how you could [Music] grow but essentially it acts as a canopy above the courtyard it's on these very slender stilts and you walk underneath it and it creates this dappled light on the ground and the title just refers to the effect of it has on the ground and I guess that Universal experience that we've all had of sitting under a tree in the summer and feeling like this is a wonderful [Music] moment the Shadows become more important with the work and it used to be a byproduct but I've been trying to sort of investigated as the actual artwork itself so there pie like slow AR inside a cube that that the shadow is actually the end product or the [Music] piece that refers back to a quotation that I chanced upon in the Science Museum from Dorothy hodkin who was a scientist working in the last century and she pioneered a process called Crystal radiography which is Shining Light through crystals and you then look at the the the um the the Silhouettes of the crystals to try and understand their form she described the process is like trying to work out the structure of a tree by only seeing its shadow we live in these sort of Shadows and we'll never be able to see the real tree I think it's so it's a really sort of nice very humble kind of metaphor that sort of acknowledges the limits of of our potential or or how much we'll ever be able to know I was really fascinated with it when he showed me the original drawings and to see this thing develop as an organic project and now to see that sunlight shading onto the courtyard that was quite remarkable to really see what Conrad wanted to achieve with this structure uh in this morning was fantastic I think it's absolutely beautiful and I think it's amazing when someone gets so much I think they have so much conviction and a vision that it becomes form isn't it and then you get to see it it's full Radiance in real life it really takes you when you come in and then you think you know it's growing it's all these triangles growing and growing and is it a snake or will it become a dragon or and they were all the shades on the ground that was all really playing between sun shade light sky that was interesting too two elderly ladies came in Nots Sal longa and all this mess was on the floor before we actually elevated it and they looked absolutely horrified and said what on Earth is this what on Earth is going on what's the academy doing is this a tank crap or something and they thought it was the Royal Academy terrorist policy and then when they came back later they a lot of them had been elevated on this support structure so they became like ancient trees they then thought oh marvelous you know they kind understood what it was but I love the fact that only he could generate that kind of reaction I think the work at the Royal Academy is a real Masterwork and I was I knew it was going to be a great work when I actually saw it then I was astounded by not only how Monumental it is but how lyrical it is as well and it has a kind of likeness to it which which it's very difficult to achieve in in sculpture Conrad sha cross's breathtaking creative curiosity shows no sign of waning a fusion of physics metaphysics language and metaphor his work chisel away at the certainty of knowledge and our assumptions about the world world around us Conrad is just using the materials of our age at his disposal to create sort of fantastic questions they're always questioning there's never an answer with his work it's always a question there have been these wonderful Yura moments there were really like a sort of scientist stumbling across something for the first time and that moment of realization was very sort of exciting I don't quite know how con does it I've never known an artist who's managed such enormous projects public Commission that are all conflating at the same time and I think it's a very exciting time to see his suddenly sort of extraordinary [Music] [Music] rise [Music] brilliant ideas powered by Hyundai motor

Channel: Bloomberg Originals

Views: 58,343

Keywords: Bloomberg, Conrad Shawcross, brilliant ideas, royal academy, science, physics

Id: 5UbxSscomXA

Length: 24min 14sec (1454 seconds)

Published: Fri Feb 19 2016