Tiffany Shlain and Ken Goldberg’s Ancient Wisdom For A Future Ecology: Trees, Time & Technology at Skirball Cultural Center, Los Angeles for Getty’s PST Art & Science Collide

 Tiffany Shlain and Ken Goldberg’s Ancient Wisdom, installation view 2024, photo by Stefanie Atkinson Schwartz. Courtesy of Skirball Cultural Center, Los Angeles

By LITA BARRIE October 24, 2024

A high point of the long-anticipated Getty’s Pacific Standard Time ART Initiative: Art & Science Collide is a collaborative exhibition by interdisciplinary artists and life partners, Tiffany Shlain and Ken Goldberg, who both understand the power of art to raise questions.    

This exhibition is a rare combination of exquisite craftsmanship and dedicated scholarship, using the ancient science of dendrochronology: tree-ring dating that uses the annual growth increments of trees to estimate their age. Featuring six large tree-ring sculptures made from salvaged wood, the works draw parallels between the past, present and future to remind us that trees and humans have always been interdependent in scholarly, scientific, artistic and spiritual practices. Trees also outlive humans and bear witness to human history.

In a number of U.S. National Park units, historical timelines inscribed on large tree-rings are on display. These cross-sections with traditional timelines were once considered authoritative, objective accounts of history. Shlain did her first tree ring sculpture Dendrofemonology: A Feminist History Tree Ring, which challenged these constructions as “alternative facts” rather than truthful narratives and showed that  “progress doesn't always work in one direction” as Shlain told me. For this Getty PST Art Art & Science Collide exhibition, Shlain and Goldberg reconstruct timelines that deliberately underscore the subjective nature of traditional historical interpretation with unorthodox timelines that expand the patriarchal western perspective on trees, history, science, culture and memory with a more inclusive, forward looking, sustainable perspective which also incorporates artificial intelligence.

This rigorously researched exhibition is encyclopedic in its breadth and scope, and allows viewers to examine poetic texts, symbols and numbers that Shlain burns into salvaged tree slices using the ancient technique of pyrography (“writing with fire”), which dates back to prehistory. Because the wood itself has so much beauty, they leave it in its natural state and work around the grain with the written inscriptions. 

The massive centerpiece of the exhibition, Tree of Knowledge, is a reclaimed slice of a Eucalyptus trunk, measuring 8.5 feet x 8.5 feet. Goldberg jokingly refers to it as, “7,000 pounds of knowledge.” The title harkens back to the forbidden tree of knowledge in the Garden of Eden. In this piece, the artists draw on their Jewish heritage of placing high value on asking questions, so on this massive tree trunk, viewers can read 160 burning questions that continue to inspire humanity's quest for knowledge. The questions are organized into six branches: Mind, Humanities, Society, Sciences, Beliefs and Philosophy. The most essential questions to early human existence are burned into the center and ripple outward to more current questions about artificial intelligence. A startling question that struck me as the most relevant to our political time is, “when is it okay to lie?”  Walking around this massive work, one can see that although knowledge is gained from asking questions, some questions can never be answered. The artists also inter-reference questions with each other and include memorable quotations. This distillation of knowledge is based on years of research and consultation with different scholars.

If We Lose Ourselves is a reclaimed box elder tree ring with a timeline that highlights the most important innovations in the history of preserving and transmitting human knowledge: starting with the invention of writing in Sumer and Egypt in 3200 BCE, and continuing with the Vedas in 1500-1200 BCE, Socrates’ prediction that the invention of writing would erode our ability to remember in 370 BCE, the discoveries of the Dead Sea Scrolls in 200 BCE and the Rosetta Stone in 196 BCE, the Library of Congress in 1800, Nazi book burnings in 1933, the World Wide Web in 1993, the Internet Archive (founded to preserve web pages) in 1996, and finally to Wikipedia in 2001. This tree ring is a “record of records” that emphasizes the role of paper - made from trees - in storing, archiving and transmitting human knowledge from ancient times, even though today, much of it is stored online. If humanity ever loses its way and needs to restart civilization, the ideas and archival places burned on this finely crafted work hold the clues.  
 

 Tiffany Shlain and Ken Goldberg’s Ancient Wisdom, installation view 2024, photo by Stefanie Atkinson Schwartz. Courtesy of Skirball Cultural Center, Los Angeles

 Tiffany Shlain and Ken Goldberg’s Ancient Wisdom, installation view 2024, photo by Stefanie Atkinson Schwartz. Courtesy of Skirball Cultural Center, Los Angeles

Abstract Expression is made from reclaimed redwood and it is the only wordless timeline in the exhibition. It traces a visual history of science using mathematical symbols - which are abstractions themselves - that aesthetically contrast with the heavy materiality of the redwood slice. Einstein described mathematics as “the poetry of logical ideas,” which the artists illustrate by using the intricacy of pyrography to let the beauty of the symbols speak for themselves. The history begins with Pythagoras and ends in 2016, and even without understanding their meaning, the viewer can feel the aesthetic love of the beauty of equations that motivated Einstein. 

DendroJudaeology: A Timeline of the Jewish People is made from reclaimed poplar wood and references both dendrochronology and archaeology. The artists are more emotionally invested in this piece as Jewish Americans, even though they started working on it two years ago – long before October 7th - in consultation with rabbis and historians to distill 5,000 years of Jewish history.

Two Notes is a circular wood ball sculpture made from reclaimed elm based on the story of an eighteenth-century Hasidic Rabbi, Simcha Bunim, who carried notes on two slips of paper in separate pockets. One of these was inscribed, “for my sake the world was created” (from the Babylonian Talmud), with the other note reading, “I am but dust and ashes” (a phrase attributed to Abraham in the Hebrew Bible). The notes were used as separate reminders, depending on the need, to summon courage or humility. These two phrases are burned into the opposite sides of the carved wood circular ball so they can also be viewed through an ecological lens – emphasizing our duty to care for nature because it is our destiny to return to it. 

 Tiffany Shlain and Ken Goldberg’s Ancient Wisdom, installation view 2024, photo by Stefanie Atkinson Schwartz. Courtesy of Skirball Cultural Center, Los Angeles

The exhibition also incorporates a four-minute video inspired by Ed Ruscha’s Streets of Los Angeles (1965): Speculation, Like Nature, Abhors a Vacuum. This aerial video is an artistic interpretation of an urban tree canopy covering four Los Angeles boulevards: Hollywood, Sunset, Manchester and Whittier to show the difference in tree canopy and shade inequity. Ruscha focused on L.A.’s urban signage and architecture in the 1960s before there were many trees, which made signs dominate the view from car windows. Similarly, the artists incorporate data from Google’s open source Auto Arborist dataset and utilize AI tools to identify tree species. The exhibition also includes a participatory element, Seeing the Forest, which allows anyone in LA  to create a personalized “tribute” to a tree in their lives by uploading a photo of a tree and a few details such as the nearest zip code.  An AI system customized by the artists generates an idealized image of the tree and a 100 word textual tribute based on LA history.   

Shlain and Goldberg have collaborated on numerous art projects and film documentaries including the Emmy-nominated series The Future Starts Here and have received multiple awards for their documentary short, The Tribe, which premiered at the Sundance Film Festival. They also worked independently as artists, exhibiting at the Whitney and at MOMA in New York. Their work has always been conceptualized as a catalyst to change thinking and motivate activism.  

This learned exhibition both informs and ignites curiosity, inspiring viewers to ponder the significance trees have in shaping our lives and our future ecology. Each sculpture is a visual locus, providing a more expansive perspective on the lessons of the past to inform our future. WM    

Skirball Cultural Center, Los Angeles, October 17, 2024 - March 2, 2025