Our man William James, whom I can’t seem to let go of (the philosopher A. N. Whitehead, who knew him personally, called him an “adorable genius”), experienced firsthand the San Francisco earthquake of 1906. He was sixty-four. He awakened to the rumbling; his hotel was shaken, he wrote, like a rat by a terrier. He did not despair, however, or descend into death shivers. He exulted in the force. He roared, “Go it. Go it stronger.”
James would have said to Julia Lohmann, “Go it.”
Lohmann, a contemporary German artist, was commissioned to fashion a work for the street-level windows of the London headquarters of the Wellcome Trust, a foundation for health research. Fittingly, she settled on a female figure, traditionally an icon of bodily vitality and beauty.
How would she create the wholesome elegance? With paint or pencil, pixel or plastic? No, with bacteria. Lohmann made two immense reclining nudes from nine thousand petri dishes, each of which was teeming with living microbes. Diseases thriving on perfect circles of bright orange or red or pink, arranged into urban-transforming Venusian splendor: what more potent, enthusiastic, and generous-hearted conversion of destruction into exuberance, mindless decay into meaning, life into art, could there be?