Tacita Dean; Mountains, John Tyndall

Arts & Ideas

BBC

Society & Culture

4.2 • 599 Ratings

🗓️ 24 May 2018

⏱️ 48 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Eleanor Rosamund Barraclough meets the British artist Tacita Dean. ‘Tacita Dean: Landscape’ has just opened at the Royal Academy in London and features vast chalk mountains and cloudscapes and a film made in Cornwall, Yellowstone and Wyoming. And what does an artist do when she travels hundreds of miles to film a total eclipse of the sun… and finds there’s no film in the camera. Then focus on mountains and those who climb them. New Generation Thinker Ben Anderson reflects on an interplay between climbing and photography in the late nineteenth century, the age of Being Still. Plus John Tyndall who took his mountaineering and poetic meditations back to the lab and proved why the sky is blue and mountains are cooler at the top than at the bottom. With Tyndall's biographer, Roland Jackson and literary scholar Gregory Tate.

Tacita Dean Landscape is at the Royal Academy until August 12th. Last chance to see Tacita Dean: Portrait is at the National Portrait Gallery, 15 March-28 May; Still Life is at the National Gallery, 15 March-28 May

Roland Jackson, Visiting Fellow at the Royal Institution THE ASCENT OF JOHN TYNDALL: Victorian Scientist, Mountaineer and Public Intellectual is out now. Greg Tate lectures in Victorian Literature at the University of St Andrews and was chosen as a New Generation Thinker in 2013.

Ben Anderson is a 2018 New Generation Thinker from Keele University who is writing a book Modern Natures: Mountain Leisure and Urban Culture in England and Germany, c. 1885-1918.

New Generation Thinkers is a scheme run by BBC Radio 3 and the Arts and Humanities to select ten academics each year who can turn their research into radio.

Presenter: Eleanor Rosamund Barraclough Producer: Jacqueline Smith

Transcript

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0:00.0	Welcome back to the home of the oxymoron. Evil genius. He asked the newspaper to print his obituary early so he'd enjoy it. That's like hiding at your own funeral. Yeah, a big, great gig. I'm Russell Kane. Join me to weigh in on whether the biggest players in history are more evil or genius. Becoming that rich, I'd say that is some level of genius. It also helps that it's a long time ago, right?
0:23.3	It's like the podcast version of telling your kids the ice cream van plays music when it's out of ice cream.
0:28.8	Listen to evil genius on BBC Sounds.
0:32.0	Hello, I'm Eleanor Rosamond Barracloff.
0:34.5	Welcome to BBC Radio 3's Arts and Discussion Program, which brings together
0:38.9	leading artists, writers and thinkers in conversations and debate. If you enjoy what you hear,
0:45.1	do subscribe. Search for the Arts and Ideas podcast wherever you get your podcasts. And while you're
0:50.5	there, please rate and review us. It'll help other people find us.
0:55.9	This is the BBC.
0:59.3	Hail to the Alps.
1:03.6	Dine they are, pyramid beyond pyramid, crest above crest.
1:10.2	So the mountaineer and physicist John Tyndall confided to his journal in the summer of 1861. Today we'll be hearing about how mountaineering
1:13.6	contributed to the career highs of one of this country's greatest but least remembered physicists
1:19.8	from Tyndall's biographer Roland Jackson and literary scholar Gregory Tate. Roland, Greg,
1:26.9	let's quickly get a taster from you. Tindall was a great
1:29.8	poetry lover and he saw parallels between poetry and physics. Roland, you first. Yes, he did. In a sense
1:37.8	that he saw the idea of the creative imagination as very much common to both. So Tindall viewed
1:44.0	the scientific and poetic imaginations
1:46.5	as complementary, and you valued both of them for the different insights they gave into the universe,
1:51.5	what you might call the scientific insight and the emotional or spiritual, we'd say today.
1:56.3	Greg, anything to add to that? The insights are different, but for Tyndall, the methods of poetry and science were very similar.
2:03.3	They both start with the observation of nature, and then they use those observations to develop these theoretical, larger arguments.
	...

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