Lauren Bon was recently profiled in the PBS SoCal’s documentary ART & SCIENCE COLLIDE, highlighting artists featured in 2024’s Getty’s Pacific Standard Time. This huge event brought together artists, scientists and institutions across Southern California to address some of humanity’s most urgent challenges, from climate change and space exploration to biodiversity and environmental justice.
For the film’s premiere at the Getty Center, PBS and the Getty Foundation assembled a panel to discuss the film, and their featured work. Moderated by Dr. Cara Santa Maria, the panel featured environmental artist Lauren Bon along with Cannupa Hanska Luger, an award-winning artist whose practice reflects Indigenous innovation and shifts collective thinking, and the PBS film’s director Jessica Kingdon, a documentarian and Academy Award-nominee for her film Ascension.
The film is available now and a transcript of the panel is below.
DR. CARA SANTA MARIA: Thank you for joining us. I guess another round of applause for the incredible film. And of course that was only a selection. It’s about twice, a little more than twice as long. So some of these stories or all of the stories actually come back around. But before we dive into it, I want to once again welcome this wonderful panel.
So we’re gonna start with Cannupa Hanska Luger. He is the sculptor who you saw in the piece whose “sovereignty suit” was featured in PST Art. And then on the end there, we have Lauren Bon. She’s an environmental artist whose project Bending the River and specifically Concrete is Fluid, right, was featured in the film.
And the one person on the panel who you didn’t see because she was behind the camera is Jessica Kingdon. She is an Academy Award-nominated filmmaker, and she was responsible for the film that you just saw. She’s the one who directed it.
And I’m Cara Santa Maria. I guess I’m here representing the science side of the equation. I am a neuroscientist turned public science communicator. I’ve actually worked with PBS for many, many years, and this season narrated Earth Focus, which you saw a clip from earlier, and have done several shows for them.
And more recently, I have become a licensed clinical psychologist. So I’m on my third career. But never an artist, always a scientist. And this is going to be a fun chat where art and science, of course, collide. And so I thought that I might start actually with you, Jessica, because as we saw at the very beginning, there were over 800 artists represented in PST Art, and you’re tasked with making a film about this incredible event.
How do you even choose? Where do you begin? And was it about the individual artists? Was it about something that would be easy to display on film? Was it about the themes that you wanted to celebrate?
JESSICA KINGDON: Yeah, thanks for that question, and thanks everyone for coming out tonight. Definitely not an easy task to whittle down from 800 artists, but we’re so happy with the artists that we ended up with.
I think one rule that I had, there was the obvious rule of, you know, including artists whose projects include some intersection of art and science that can work in a legible way on screen.
But I was also interested in artists who have a very rich inner life, but an equally rich fascination with the world around them, either through scientific phenomena or cultural histories that could be represented on screen so that we could we could have them up on screen in a cinematic way.
I think that seeing artists at work and artists’ processes are really fascinating, but I think that it can be limiting in a film, and so I wanted to have some other element that we could portray. So really thinking about the source material that drive these artists, and also, of course, people who are extremely charismatic and smart.
DR. CARA SANTA MARIA: And I love the sorta, it’s a little bit meta that you are making art about these artists making art about the intersection about art and science. One of the things that we were sort of talking about offline is the fundamental definition of those terms.
We talk about art and science colliding, and I think all of us have a feeling of what that means, but talk to any artist, talk to any scientist, and we could pontificate for hours about what art is, what science is.
One of the things that we were discussing is that very often when it comes to science, what we read in textbooks, or when it comes to art, what we perceive in a gallery, we see the content, but what’s missing is the process. And the process really is the meat of science and art. I think in a lot of ways that is one of the fundamental, I guess, synergistic things about science and art is that they’re about the process, and the content is sort of the end result.
But we were talking about this before. I’m curious, Cannupa, about your experience. You know, you’re showing these incredible sovereignty suits, but there’s so much in it. Do you hope that those who are observing it really get this story? How do you even communicate that story?
CANNUPA HANSKA LUGER: No, I don’t think I do hope that they get the story. I think that sort of thinking is what puts in motion us as a population to expect a result rather than experience the process.
When you’re like, I want the thing at the other side of it, I don’t want to know how it’s done. Please, you know. But throughout human history, we are like the greatest archive that ever existed. And I mean like every living thing that’s on the planet right now. This is a collective of the most brilliant efforts to survive on the planet. And yet we look for, you know, an easy paper to read or an art object to look at, that seems to resolve all of that without the complex, continuous effort of the process.
DR. CARA SANTA MARIA: Absolutely, and I think, Lauren, it’s a good turn to you because so much of what you were exhibiting was that process. We got to hear about it in the film, but you also get to experience it through your work. How did you represent the process in the content? How did you share that story?
LAUREN BON: You mean in Concrete is Fluid?
DR. CARA SANTA MARIA: Absolutely.
LAUREN BON: I think through recognizing that the animism of what lies beneath the city needed to be evoked in order to give the river back its story. I mean, the epistemological destruction of our connection to the life force through colonization is something that can’t be repaired simply by moving a wastewater river in its direction out to sea, to a brownfield. You have to rebuild the narrative that has been broken and so... when we popped up that piece of concrete, when you saw that moment and discovered that there was a river underneath the river, that what I thought was the basement of the city was actually the ceiling of an “underland.”
The question of how do I bring that to this public that, some people don’t even know that LA has a river. And I realized that for me, that came back to that feeling, you know, when you’re in a beautiful dream state, like after a wonderful, warm day and maybe you’ve had a swim and you’re sort of in a part waking, part sleeping state and the sun’s glistening against a mountain and a cloud passes and you’re sure you’ve seen a human face or an animal in that mountain, I wanted to make objects literally out of the muck that I found underneath the concrete that brought that mystery, that aliveness to a gallery. And that’s what Concrete is Fluid is about.
To first of all understand that the material reality of concrete, as a chosen material, is used because it never dries. So that thing which is so solid is in effect also liquid, and that through heating and cooling it gives it its flexibility, which is why we use it for infrastructure and have done for thousands of years. But that, in fact, it is also protected, this vast seedbed that lies underneath the city, and we have not destroyed anything by covering the city with concrete. We have perhaps protected, for future generations, the vast abundance that is life, from ourselves.
DR. CARA SANTA MARIA: In this story you mentioned, I think, you touched on a theme that I saw again and again in the film, and I’d love to hear from both of the artists and the filmmaker. Maybe we can kind of go around, and share your relationship to this theme, and that theme that I just keep seeing over and over is colonialism, this kind of Western hegemony, right, this idea of what is science, what is progress, what is human. I mean, we were talking about this before, this myth of human exceptionalism, and how do we approach the collision of art and science in a way that honors our humanity and our relationship to our ecology, our relationship to the planet.
I mean, that really is a big part of what Sovereign was about, isn’t it?
CANNUPA HANSKA LUGER: Yeah, I mean, I hope so. I hope that’s what it was about. I think that this idea of human exceptionalism, I would also say that we’ve compounded that in our present society too, this myth of rugged individualism that has been pushed through so many narratives, following colonialism, following these sorts of efforts.
And I think you’re right. How do you build, how do you reframe that narrative by using the same powers of myth-making, the same things that spark inquiry and drive us to, like, explore and imagine.
I was joking just a moment before this. I made a career out of make-believe, and I’m like, thank you PBS, you know? I’m making it up as I’ve gone along, and that’s true for all of us, you know? We really do just... kind of make it up and find the results to bolster that. So you can end up with human exceptionalism. You can end up with rugged individualism, but we could end up with so much more.
I like this idea of encouraging everybody else to imagine alternatives to these things, because if you don’t like it, going against it doesn’t change it as fast as generating an alternative that makes it obsolete.
DR. CARA SANTA MARIA: I think that speaks so, so much. It’s funny, I was actually just podcasting this morning with an author who wrote a children’s book celebrating a Black inventor and we were talking about how she never got to see people who look like her on the pages when she was growing up and how important it was for her to give back in that way.
One of the things that she said was that this myth of the lone genius really is... it’s pernicious. All of us have genius inside of us, and if we could all tap into that genius, this plurality of voices really could affect change.
What I worry about is that we’re in an environment now where a new Lysenkoism could be happening, where there is a squashing of voices. And I think science and art together as one are experiencing that from the current administration.
We’re experiencing a quieting, a squashing of those voices, when what we should be doing is celebrating a plurality and so I am curious to continue that thread. Maybe we can move to you next. How did that theme come about in the film itself? And how intentional were you in elevating those voices?
JESSICA KINGDON: Yeah, I mean, when we were looking through all of the projects and all of the 800 plus artists, what they were doing, my team and I were surprised to find these common themes that came up, that had to do with indigenous and native cosmologies and these kind of ways of looking at science that were outside the Western hegemonic models.
And I think that that was something that the PST staff found as well. They didn’t put a call out specifying that, but when it came back to them, they were surprised to find this common thread. And so I found that very exciting and heartening. I also myself had been interested in looking at science in a way that deprioritizes the human, because I’m also making a project myself about animal sentience and the food supply chain and looking at different species of animals and questioning this kind of imagined hierarchy of intelligence and why do we eat some animals and not others and is it like intelligence we’re looking at as a barometer, or the ability to suffer? And if so, why?
So all of these questions had already been on my mind about art and science, and so coming into this project, it kind of fit in very organically. And then to see so many of the artists kind of grappling with things that I’m thinking about, which happen to be ideas about seeing us ourselves not as other than nature, but as part of nature. and seeing how the artist took those prompts and all went in very different directions, but all coming through the same thread, was a really exciting challenge to try to unify it in the film.
DR. CARA SANTA MARIA: And that was something that was actually made explicit in one of those final scenes we saw, where Hayv (Kahraman), who unfortunately couldn’t be with us tonight, and we’re all very sorry that she couldn’t make it, we were looking forward to having her as part of the conversation, she really mentioned that interconnectedness as an important theme in her work.
And so I think that we’re starting to run a bit low on time, but Lauren, we have to at the very least get to you. I’m curious about your take. You sort of brought up the conversation about colonialism, about indigenous knowledge, about sort of our relationship to the earth. I’m curious how that kind of makes itself apparent in your work.
LAUREN BON: Well, when you pop up a piece of concrete and you find that what’s underneath it is still alive and well and waiting, it reminds you of all the things we think we know and think we have a grasp on, and they’re actually extremely located in the brevity of our lives. And that it’s only been a blink of an eye since humans were even on the planet, and an even shorter blink of an eye when we had enough agriculture to use our time instead of hunting and gathering, but to make this thing that we call culture. Agriculture made culture possible.
Science is just another form of spell-casting. And I think what we’ve really experienced here with this very large Getty PST event, is a form of collective spell-casting under the rubric of Art & Science Collide. I mean, colliding in itself sounds like atomizing potentiality. So yeah, I think this film really captures the spellcasting gestalt of this moment. Bring it on.
DR. CARA SANTA MARIA: What a way with words you have. It’s so beautiful and so compelling. I can’t help but feel, again, like I mentioned, I’m sort of the representative of science and scientists sitting here, that as I had the honor of observing the film, of experiencing some of the things that I learned from PST Art, from PBS SoCal, from the Getty, that there is this celebration of science that I see in the art world — whether it’s utilizing scientific principles, or whether it’s being inspired by speculative fiction — that I want to see more of my peers and colleagues learning from the art world how better to do our science, and not just do our science, but communicate the necessity and the beauty and the fascination of science.
And I think, to end on a quick note, and I’m gonna throw it back to you for our final thing, because we were talking about something before, and I just, I feel like it has to get out. But we were talking about the thing that makes both science and art kind of one and the same. And what’s the word you used? I think it was inquiry?
CANNUPA HANSKA LUGER: I mean, that’s it. It’s about the process of it, like both science and art. We look to the result, but really it’s about inquiry. It’s about curiosity. It’s about... obsessive compulsive, you know, it’s about doing something over and over and over and finding that it varies every single time, that there’s change and shift in that experience. And I just don’t see much difference between an artist and a scientist and you know, they mentioned Leonardo da Vinci, but I’m like, how many untold alchemists had mixed different minerals and materials to create both paint and medicine?
This is human. This is something that we do, and it’s also something that life does. What organisms aren’t, you know, in the crucible of alchemy and generating something that is both science and art simultaneous?
DR. CARA SANTA MARIA: Absolutely. And I can’t help but think about, again, this morning I was reminded of a quote that I will now butcher by Stephen Jay Gould. I’ll give you the gist of it because I don’t remember the wording, where he talks about the fact that he is sort of less interested in studying all of the different convolutions of Einstein’s brain, and is much more interested in knowing all of the different brains who we never got to know their names, right?
All of the inventions that they were holding, all of the creativity across all of the unknown people on this planet who, because of that myth of the lone genius, because of that myth of sort of Western white male exceptionalism, were hidden, were quieted.
And so to celebrate this, this incredible group of artists and scientists and to elevate and to foster those voices is only going to improve our experience on this planet. And I think that’s the one place where I can maintain a little bit of hope against the landscape that we’re dealing with right now, is that we are all curious creatures. We are all hungry and we are all always engaging in inquiry, and I guess that’s where art and science collide. So I have to thank this incredible panel. It was too short.
There’s so much more to say. I have to thank all of you for coming and joining us tonight, and for PBS SoCal, for The Getty. Thank you, and good night.
