For Natural History Museum, Cosmos Is Tapestry

Enceladus’ white craggy surface is covered with meandering turquoise lines.
They are the same color as the bits of ocean featured in travel commercials for sunny and secluded islands.

However, appearances are deceiving. With a surface temperature of around -300 degrees Fahrenheit, Saturn’s moon Enceladus is, of course, very far from a Caribbean resort.

Yet, the tension created by seeing the familiar—what seems to be exceptionally bright and clear rivers—is the driving force behind both the science and the aesthetics of “Saturn: Images from the Cassini-Huygens Mission” at the American Museum of Natural History.

This small exhibit features images sent back to earth by the Cassini orbiter, which has been exploring Saturn and its environs since 2004.

Despite its size and regrettable position between the entrance to the IMAX theater and the school group check-in area, the show is intriguing. These photographs were produced for the sake of scientific exploration, but their composition is certainly artistic.

The photographs in the series “Moons and Rings” features images laid out in ways that strongly suggest an artist’s involvement in creating them. Floating white orbs are suspended in completely dark space over, next to, or behind Saturn’s majestic rings.

In each photograph, the objects pictured—which vary in size, shape, distance from the camera—are juxtaposed to create surreal landscapes rivaling those in any painting by Salvador Dali, Joan Miro, or Max Ernst hanging on the walls of MoMA.

Yet, these “surreal” landscapes were created by a NASA-built spacecraft. They are, in fact, documents of the reality of the depths of our solar system. In this exhibit, cold and rational science creates an aesthetic that one expects to find in dramatic and emotional art.

The theme of finding familiar aesthetics in unexpected places echoes the science that these photos are used to illustrate. The show centers on images of three heavenly bodies: the planet Saturn itself, and its moons Titan and Enceladus. Titan and Enceladus are featured prominently in the show for one reason: according to the exhibition text, they “have the ingredients for life.”

The wall tag next to one photograph of Titan explains that the conditions on the moon, which include “a brew of organic molecules, water and sources of energy” and a “dense nitrogen atmosphere, resemble the environment of primordial earth.” Cassini has discovered the familiar—the elements necessary to form potentially earth-like life forms—in an unexpected place, the beyond-icy outskirts of our solar system.

The discovery of earth-like things in space is surprising and a bit unsettling. But in the end, it’s pretty cool—just like seeing spacecraft-created works of art one gallery over from a stuffed bison that Teddy Roosevelt, the founder of the museum, probably shot himself.
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Diana Greenwald is a Columbia College sophomore majoring in art history. EarthWorks of Art runs alternate Fridays.