AMERICAS CENTER ON SCIENCE AND SOCIETY

THE CITY UNIVERSITY OF NEW YORK

Symposium and Exhibition celebrating

LIMULUS The Horseshoe Crab

December 4th-20th 2001

Brian Nissen

My participation in this event had a curious beginning. I was at the celebration of a friend’s 60th birthday about a year ago, seated at a table with nobody I knew. Between drinks and dining I mentioned in passing that I was a sculptor and painter and had been working for some time on the theme of horseshoe crabs. By chance it turned out that I was sitting next to an ecologist, a biologist and a scientist, all well informed about the animal, and so for the rest of the evening an excited encounter of champions of Limulus took over, dominating the conversation.

Until then I had seemed to be a lone enthusiast of Limulus, surprising my friends by my obsession with this strange creature. But then I had spent a long time working around its forms and had found it an inspired subject to explore in my work. Most of the people I knew had never heard of the creature - except some of those familiar with the beaches of New England - and I had felt like a lone herald carrying the banner for Limulus, expounding on its amazing attributes. So this encounter with horseshoe crab fans was a delight for me.

My new friends then organized a trip for us to meet some other biologists and to witness with them the spectacle of Limulus’ annual mating ritual out at the Gateway National Park on Long Island. Once a year hordes of horseshoe crabs invade the beaches of the East Coast, where they appear on the night of the last full moon of May at the height of the spring tide and consummate their honeymoon on the shoreline.

My first encounter with horseshoe crabs was in Menemsha pond, on Martha’s Vineyard. I was fascinated by the appearance of the animal. Fearsome, fantastic, and formidable - a marvel of the mechanics of nature. Something straight out medieval bestiaries, a rival to the Basilisk, the Phoenix, Chimera, Manticore, and Salamander. Artists and poets have conjured up fabulous animals, from the ancients to Lewis Carroll, Joan Miró, and Jorge Luis Borges. But this time, the fabulous creature was for real.

They looked to me like some kind of primitive tank, or a Japanese warriors’ helmet; something out of science fiction: Primeval and futuristic at the same time. I began to be haunted by its shape and structure. The simple helmet shape of the exterior enveloping the complex mechanics of its underside began to show up in my work, first as sculptures, and then as collages and reliefs.

It is true that the horseshoe crab though completely harmless, has a frightening aspect. People are scared to even touch it and fear the awesome spike that is its tail, which serves as a lever used to right itself when flipped over by the tide, and is quite harmless. But I found a strange splendor in this animal; its fantastic shape seemed so ancient and yet strangely modern. From the front we are looking at a kind of stealth bomber: Inside at something that looks like an ancestral scorpion. A true survivor. An amazing design of nature. I collected their cast off carapaces and they became a presence in my studio, sometimes intimidating, sometimes leading me on. Always watching. There is something of Beauty and the Beast, or rather the Beauty of the Beast, in the way we react to Limulus.

What led me into the sculptures was the tremendous visual presence of this animal, with its contrasting shapes encompassing the same space. A conflation of Inside and Outside. The challenge was to make these connected spaces play off each other.

I have a liking for such spaces. They originate with Picasso’s seminal sculpture, his cut-out tin guitar of 1912, which for me, was, as it were, the relativity theory of sculpture, with outside and inside confounding and usurping each other’s natural place. A cylinder protruding from the surface of the guitar represents what should be the hole into the interior, a concept of sculptural space never seen before.

One of the wondrous aspects of the horseshoe crab is that it comes to us intact from the depths of time. Our living fossil has been around for hundreds of millions of years. It was a denizen of Pangaea, and witness to the original supercontinent as it drifted apart. It is so old that it is challenges our perception of time. Although it has survived over 200 million years without changing form, variants can be traced back some 350 million years - give or take a few million. We can’t always be that precise.

- Although - (we are told) a guard in the British Museum’s Egyptian halls who was assisting a visitor who inquired about the age of a mummified body she was staring at -

‘It is 5 thousand and 3 years, 8 months and 4 days old ’ he ventured. ‘Exactly?’ ‘Yes exactly.’ ‘My goodness, how can you know with such precision?’ ‘Well, madam, I have been working here for 3 years, 8 months and 4 days, and when I started it was 5 thousand years old.’

Well, anyway, hundreds of million years is a long time for Limulus to go without changing form, and so I thought it was about time somebody did something about it.

And so, when working on the bronzes for this series, I was acutely aware of the parallels of time and longevity. I made the originals in wax, mindful that I was interpreting this ancient animal using an ancient technology. Bronze casting is probably the oldest of man’s technological achievements, which is still in use today virtually unchanged. The lost wax process used today for casting the titanium fan blades inside jet engines is exactly the same process used for casting bronze 4000 years ago in China and the Middle East - maybe with more precision and temperature controls, but still the same.

Artists and writers from Leonardo, Kircher and Dürer, to Buffon and Audubon, have all enriched the natural sciences. One of the books that has been a kind of touchstone for me is D’Arcy Thompson’s "On Growth and Form’. Two things make the Scottish biologist and classical scholar D’Arcy Thompson worth remembering. One is the sheer brilliance of On Growth and Form, which certainly deserves an honored place in the history of biology. The other is, as Peter Medawar calls it, "beyond comparison the finest work of literature in all the annals of science that have been recorded in the English tongue".

D’Arcy was equally at home in many disciplines, including classics and the humanities, mathematics, and zoology. He demonstrated how the mechanics of living structures relate to principles of structural engineering. He believed that there was purpose in their design, which obeyed forces of torsion, tension and compression, influencing their growth, function and form, and that all of these were qualified by Magnitude.

Various components of art - color, line, structure, texture, composition, volume and spatial relationships are idioms in their own right, with their own possibilities. D’Arcy Thompson made us aware of another: Magnitude. Magnitude (scale) is a factor as important as the others. Rothko’s paintings need to be a certain size in order for his colors to saturate our eyes in a particular way. The rhythms of Van Gogh’s impasto brushstrokes would not work on a larger scale: they have to do with the movement of the hand, while Richard Serra’s monumental steel ellipses depend for their effect on their particular relation to the human body. Murals and miniatures are extremes of scale working within a given range. Chamber music and orchestral music are conditioned and defined by scale, as are poems, essays and novels. Miniaturization or amplification converts the object not just into a larger or smaller version of itself, but into another entity. A newt becomes Godzilla. (a newtant?). The epic film of Moby Dick seen on a T.V. screen turns into a quest for a white sardine.

So D’Arcy’s masterwork, On Growth and Form, is a profound meditation on the shapes of living things. He makes us aware that we should not only take into account finished forms, but the forces that molded them as well. Process and sequence. Given the combination of his intellectual power and great literary gift it comes as no surprise that his writings have had an enormous influence outside biology, especially on design, architecture and the arts.

The great French architect Le Corbusier, came up with an inspired use of the horseshoe crab’s form in his design for his celebrated chapel at Ronchamp. According to Ann Koll :

Art today is greatly concerned with perception, expressed with works and strategies that challenge our way of looking at things. Can we then conceive of a horseshoe crab’s view of its world - something we can only imagine with the kaleidoscope of our mind’s eye. The horseshoe crab not only has a pair of compound, faceted eyes, but ultra-violet sensitive eyes, plus a few others. They can see things we can’t see, rather like the way dogs and whales can hear sounds beyond our hearing. We pride ourselves on our ability to see things from different points of view, but we must be humbled before Limulus’ capabilities of multiple vision.

Among other curious attributes of Limulus, are the molecules containing copper that carry oxygen in its bloodstream, instead of iron that we have in our bodies. So the horseshoe crabs really have blue blood, true blue blood - unlike some people we could mention.

Today horseshoe crabs play an important role in medicine, and have given us two important bequests. An extract of its blood cells is used to detect the smallest presence of endotoxins, (powerful chemical poisons released by certain bacteria) which is now used in hospitals worldwide. Scientists have also learned a great deal about how the human eye functions from research on horseshoe crab eyes, especially related to their capability of lateral vision. Thanks, Limulus.

On one of his expeditions to the New World, Sir Walter Raleigh came across strange creatures on the coast of North Carolina, and named them ‘horseshoe crabs’. The local Indians called them ‘see-ekanauk’, and used their tails for harpoon points. The obvious association for the name comes from the frontal shape underneath its carapace. We now know that it is not a crab at all, but rather an arthropod, an insect. But they are still called crabs: like the American Indians - named Indians because Columbus believed he had landed in India, they both got stuck with a wrong name.

Linnaeus gave the Latin name Limulus Polyphemus to our horseshoe crab. It is still a mystery to me where he got the Polyphemus from. With the abundance of eyes that Limulus has, it seems odd that it should be named after the one eyed Cyclops. But my best bet is that it was the fearsome aspect of Limulus that led to this designation.

Artists and scientists have been captivated by Limulus. It has been a delight for me that the horseshoe crab has led me to my biologist friends here with us today. We share a common enthusiasm that has enriched us all. The relationship between art and science is necessarily difficult to define. Intuition and imagination play a role in both, and so there are parallels and correspondences. They are both inventive, but Science is objective, whereas Art is subjective. And while a lot can be learned from one other, Science is analytical, rational and practical, while Art is expressive, ambiguous and impractical. Not only do their goals and methods differ, but both Science and the Arts themselves are split into conflicting factions, each claiming to communicate its own truth about the world.

But then, as the Philosopher of Science, Marjorie Green, complained: ‘Why is everything still Cartesian, relying on Descartes separation of the mechanical brain and the incorporeal mind. The only true statement he ever made was that he was born in 1596 - and even that might have been wrong.’

Science undertakes an empirical journey to find the truth of its investigations. Is art a search by the imagination for a truth of the mind and the senses?

As a youngster in London I used to listen regularly to The Brains Trust, a favorite BBC radio program. On one occasion Bertrand Russell was giving spontaneous answers to listeners' questions.

When he was asked, "What is truth?"

He answered: "The truth is what the police require you to tell."

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