How can an art historian be inspired by science? We asked art historian Jennifer Roberts to find out!

Roberts has collaborated with artist Dario Robleto on a variety of projects and exhibitions inspired by science. We talked with Roberts to learn more about the ways she has been both inspired and challenged by science throughout her career, from the concept of light years to the scale of the universe.

This blog post is part 3 of 3 in our series with art historian Jennifer Roberts. Read Collaboration, part 1 and Collaboration, part 2.

How has science inspired or challenged you as an art historian?

Let’s take the example of astronomy. When I first learned (from Cosmos [a 1980 TV series hosted by Carl Sagan that ran on PBS], of course) about the mind-boggling scale of the universe, I was stunned. I never got over it. It has profoundly changed the way I think about space and time in the visual arts, and has made me into a different kind of scholar. The concept of the light year is basically an existential challenge to the whole idea of visual knowledge. Even the closest star to us is so far away that its light takes four years to reach us. The light from the “nearby” Andromeda galaxy takes 2-and-a-half million years to reach us. This is a crushing, sublime revelation: we cannot see anything out there as it actually is. Every event we observe in the heavens is already over, has already happened. At some level, the universe is totally and completely unattainable to us. And because the universe is expanding, it’s getting more unattainable every minute.

Looking back now on my career, I can see that this cosmic sense of distance has haunted all of my work. It’s as if every work of art, even if I’m standing right in front of it, has appeared to me as if from the far end of a telescope. I’ve written a sequence of books about gaps, delays and opacities in the arts: a book about how long it took 18th-century paintings to travel across the Atlantic in dark crates in the holds of ships (and why that mattered). A book about an artist who treated time as if it were a dark heap of impenetrable rubble rather than a transparent dimension for the unfolding of incidents. A book about how, in a printing press, the act of creation happens in a dark space we can’t reach, and all we see on the paper is the delayed aftermath of that event. I see now that in all these projects I have been trying to process the lessons that astronomical scale might hole for the whole project of visual contact and expression. I have been trying to write something like an astrophysics of art.

Of course, this also helps explain why I am so drawn to Dario Robleto’s work. Everything he does is about the poignancy and poetry of signaling across the void; about how we might live together and love each other in this universe that is constantly pulling us apart. My response to his work helped me see the logic of my own work. In fact, I don’t think I would have been able to understand what I’ve been doing all these years, to tell this story about my own path through science and art and history, if I hadn’t had a chance to get to know Dario and think so deeply with him about these things. It’s just one of the many cosmic revelations that have come out of this collaboration for me.

—Jennifer L. Roberts is the Drew Gilpin Faust Professor of the Humanities at Harvard University

Dario Robleto: The Signal is on view at the Carter through October 27, 2024. This exhibition highlights the artist’s multiyear exploration of the Golden Record and includes Robleto’s newly commissioned work Ancient Beacons Long for Notice, an immersive film that investigates the scientific, philosophical, and moral tensions of attempts to represent the totality of human life.