Bright Shards of Someplace Else

The Slide Turned on End

90 The Slide Turned on End We were sitting in his home office in Concord, Massachusetts. O’Hara —a biologist by trade—explained his entry into the art world. “I was on my way to a conference on dna lithography in Illinois, when I got lost. I stopped at an art museum, called the conference directors, and realized that I got the day and time wrong. I missed the damn thing.” O’Hara gave a little shameless smile, acknowledging that brilliant minds are allowed leniency in planning and daily alertness. “So I figured , what the hell, I’ll look around for a bit, I guess. And what I saw there was nothing short of remarkable.” O’Hara, a rather shrunken man in his mid-sixties, spread his arms wide to show how widereaching his ideas were. “I saw science and art merge once and for all . . .” O’Hara claimed he glanced at a work of abstract art—a Kandinsky , he thinks—and was immediately struck by how similar it was to some of the rare amoebas he was working with at the time. “I thought I was hallucinating. I mean, here was something precisely like what I had under the slide just that morning!” So precise was the resemblance that he thought he had lost his mind. “I nudged this person next to me and said—I mean, I realize how absurd this is now—I said, ‘Is that a blown-up slide of Grayson’s amoeba, I mean, is that the guy’s er . . . inspiration?’” O’Hara reported that all he got in response was an “I think not” and some advice about brushing up on his art history. O’Hara, however, was sure that he had hit upon something significant. “The more I walked around looking at this socalled abstract art, the more I felt like I was looking at a bunch of The Slide Turned on End 91 blown-up slides turned on end.” When he returned to his university, he quickly arranged a sabbatical to study this phenomenon. “I lied to the department. I said I was going to study a new way to extract antibodies from fungi—specifically, truffles. There’s no way I would get a sabbatical to look at a bunch of art.” He was clearly pleased at his effortless deception. “Those morons heading up that department haven’t a clue. I used all the truffles they ordered for me to make dinner for a group of art critics.” Clearly, these truffle dinner parties were a success, because soon O’Hara had created a buzz among art critics. By this point, he had firmed up his idea. “I realized we humans probably react to art because we must, in some subconscious way, recognize it. Even abstract art. What I’m saying is I think we can sense the tiniest part of ourselves, and our origins—the cells, platelets, and our amoeba ancestors —in these images. And I think that’s what resonates with us when we view abstract art. We are, in a sense, recognizing the bits.” At first blush, this hardly seemed like the type of theory to garner any sort of following. The fact that it did might be more a reflection of the art world’s permanent scramble for the “new” than a reflection of its merits. Still, O’Hara was prepared for resistance. “Look, I know this theory is hard to accept. We all want to believe that we appreciate art because it’s ‘beautiful’ or somehow or other special and apart from our daily lives. But the fact is we appreciate it because it’s life—only magnified.” I must have dropped my neutral reportage face because before I knew it, O’Hara was leading me down to his basement, where he housed his “evidence.” “Look at this.” He produced a glossy photo of a striated blob. “This is a virus—the common flu, to be exact. And now look at this.” He now pulled out a reproduction of Paul Klee’s work. “Is that uncanny or what?” There was a slight resemblance of line quality , but uncanny seemed like an overstatement. Always alert to skepticism , O’Hara supplied the explanation. “If that virus was just a hair turned right, and caught during a moment of replication, it would The Slide Turned on End 92 match the Klee painting exactly.” He then produced a Helen Frankenthaler...