Exhibit Review: Mathematiques, un depaysement soudain:A Little More Mad Ophelia, Please

摘要

With the likes of David Lynch and Patti Smith as collaborators and the Fondation Cartier's el-egant centre for contemporary art as the setting, the exhibition Mathematiques, un depaysement soudain was irresistible, even given the six-hour train ride I'd have to endure to get from Torino to Paris. Before reaching the Fondation Cartier, I hap-pened upon a much smaller, less ambitious show at the city hall of the fifth arrondissement, also devoted to the theme of mathematics meets art. It contained the usual array of images of fractals and circle packings, as well as architectural and geometric sculptures that seem to feature in public exhibitions devoted to convincing audiences that mathematics is much more like art than most peo-ple think. I knew the Fondation Cartier show would be different. It was. It was certainly grander and glitzier. It featured the creme de la creme of the European mathematics community, such as Misha Gromov and Sir Michael Atiyah. It had many more visitors than the humbler show in the fifth. It had a few breathtaking pieces, but it did not live up to its goals. These, according to the text written by one of the commissionaires of the exhibition, math-ematician Jean-Pierre Bourguignon, were mainly didactic—to use the creativity of artists to help elucidate, for the public, the objects and practices of mathematicians, and especially cre-ative mathematicians.