How can we pay homage to some of these brilliant women whom science has failed to fully recognize because they were women? How to do it essentially through the image, with a “powerful portrait that can be understood in two seconds”? This is the challenge taken on by MissMe, the Montreal artist first known for his graffiti, and the Montreal Planetarium, with the small exhibition NobELLES.
Take Donna Strickland, a Canadian born in 1959. A contemporary, a relative, who we would have every reason to know. And yet. How many of us know that in 2018, she received the Nobel Prize in Physics with Gérard Mourou for her work on the frequency drift amplification technique started as part of her doctorate?
Mme Strickland, in other words, found a way to generate the then most powerful laser light. And she becomes the third woman to win a Nobel in physics, 115 years after Marie Curie. With six other scientists, she is one of those whom MissMe has chosen, in the list of unjustly forgotten people made at her request by the specialists of the Planetarium.
Also included are, for example, the American space engineer Katherine Johnson (1918-2020), the German mathematician Emmy Noether (1882-1935), the American astronomer Vera Rubin (1928-2016), the American engineer in aerospace scientist Mary Jackson (1921-2005) and British astrophysicist Jocelyn Bell (1943-), who discovered the first pulsar, for which her thesis director won the Nobel.
Punks before their time
“But they are punks, these women! Absolutely ! exclaims feminist artist MissMe on the phone. “To succeed, she continues, to be the very first to obtain a doctorate, or the only or the first woman to enter a large institution [comme la NASA, par exemple], and be the best there, and not be recognized, and continue… but you have to be completely punk! It’s just not the visual punk we’re used to seeing. They are revolutionaries, these women. They have more nerve than all of us combined. »
Choosing the seven personalities who will appear on the banners, a portrait side and an explanatory side, in the hall of the Planetarium, was “hyperdifficult”, specifies MissMe. “The scientists at the planetarium made me a monster list of full, full, full of science babes. »
“In the end, it was I who did the final cut, [le choix final], and it was so hard, she chants, and inappropriate for me to finally decide who was going to be cut or not, when they’re all a thousand times smarter and more interesting than me, you see. »
“But you had to do a limited number of portraits — because it’s a lot of work; and there was also a concern to have a minimum of diversity, different histories and fields. We also had to find photos of these women, because I always work on photos, and for many there were none, photos of them, we had not even taken their portrait, whereas for their colleagues men who discovered fewer things than them, there were tons of them. We were faced with this sort of void created by exactly what we want to denounce. »
Matter and intention
MissMe confides that she had particular pleasure in portraying Lise Meitner (1878-1968). The Austrian-Swedish physicist was nominated for the Nobel Prize 49 times, without ever winning it. His work is one that will lead to nuclear fission.
“I was really happy to do the drawing of an older woman too,” says MissMe. The erasure of women after a certain age revolts me personally; and I had a real pleasure to draw the beauty of this woman with her wrinkles and the intelligence in her eyes. »
On each of the portraits, in the MissMe way, words, quotes from each of these ladies. “There is, I find, always a trap in the way we manage our society, very visual, when we glorify women often only on their appearance. It bothers me deeply – besides, that’s why I wear a mask, ”says the one who makes all her public appearances with her face covered, often with a black hood with large mouse ears, Mickey style.
“To put their words on their faces was to bring back their intelligence, to put it on top of their genetic heritage. And it was hard to find the quotes [les citations] : they are scientists, intelligent women, not the kind of girls who make slogans, you see. They come out of the paragraphs of a rare intelligence; I, on the other hand, was a little visually stuck with it. »
The will of the Planetarium, with this gesture, is to bring back to the memory of forgotten scientists. It is well and good. However, one can wonder if presenting these people as a group, each of whom would have deserved an entire exhibition, is a real enhancement.
But they are punks, these women! Absolutely !
The Planetarium wanted to pay tribute both artistically and scientifically. Instead of thus doubling the respect rendered, it is diluted. The scientific information is kept short — one long vignette. Errors creep into the final exhibition and the accompanying technical sheets (Lise Meitner has been nominated for the Nobel 49 times, not 48, for example; the artist’s name is written as Miss Me). Artistically, we do not present the original works. Only reproductions, on plastic banners.
Funny artistic tribute that hides the importance of the work (of a woman…), of its materiality, of its unique character. Especially since Miss Me’s pieces can have a great impact: a few minutes surfing the website of the Taglialatella Gallery in Chelsea, New York, where her first solo exhibition started last week, The Apology of Anger, and we sense the effect that some of the thirty or so works presented can have when we see the originals, the disparate side, the interplay of real materials.
At the Planetarium, nobELLES is in the lobby, and you can walk around for free; or extend your visit to the space cinema by half an hour. For more information on these formidable actresses in science, there is a series of podcasts, produced and hosted by Lili Boisvert, whose tone is a little rigid at first, and which further explains the contexts — that of the time or that of now — taking surprising detours, like this interview with writer and host Geneviève Pettersen in the episode about Vera Rubin, because they both share a certain resilience. Each episode lasts about half an hour.