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Edward Emerson Barnard was a self-taught astronomer who built a house for himself and his new bride with money earned spotting comets. [A patent medicine magnate was offering $200/comet in the 1880’s; in one year, Barnard spotted eight.] He was the first person to discover a new moon of Jupiter since Gallileo.
In 1895, he became a professor of astronomy at the University of Chicago, which gave him the observatory access he needed to complete one of the first photographic sky surveys. He spent decades, up until his death in 1923, photographing the Milky Way and nebulae, and overseeing the printing of photographs for his survey.
Thanks to the tireless efforts of his cataloguer and assistant Mary Calvert, A Photographic Atlas of Selected Regions of the Milky Way, which was finally published in 1929, in an edition of around 700. It’s a stunning achievement, a handmade artist’s book in the form of pioneering science.

Georgia Tech’s library has digitized their copy of Selected Regions of the Milky Way, which allows broader access, and reduces wear and traffic on the $8-10,000 books. [The example above sold at Skinner’s scientific instruments auction in 2006 for around $7,000. Can’t find the exact number right now.]

From around 1989-92, the German photographer Thomas Ruff created a body of work using astronomical survey photos from the European Southern Observatory in Chile. There is very little discussion online of this series[1], even though I believe it’s the first time Ruff uses a found image in his work. [Before the Sterne series, Ruff was known for his very large portraits of his friends, which he described as “a construct based on identification photographs.” Since then, he has appropriated and manipulated many types of photos, including industrial catalogue illustrations and internet porn.]
Ruff talked briefly about the Star photos in a rather painful 1993 interview with Philip Pocock:

Pocock: Why stars? Do they mean something extra special to you?
Ruff: When I was eighteen I had to decide whether to become an astronomer or a photographer. I also wanted to move the so-called künstlerische Fotografie boundary. Do you know Flusser?
Pocock: No.
Ruff: He defines isolated categories for photography that sometimes cross over. For example, if medical photography is used in a journalistic way, or with the Stars, a scientific archive isn’t used for scientific research but for my idea of what stars look like. It’s also a homage to Karl Bloßfeldt. In the twenties he took photographs of plants to explain to his students architectural archetypes. So he was a researcher but the way he represented his intention with the help of photography made him an artist. I like these crossovers.

All interesting enough, but given the photos he uses, I think the most relevant perspective comes earlier in another part of the interview, where he distinguishes between photographing to “capture reality” and “to make a picture.”
Ruff definitely makes an awesome picture. The Sterne photos are stunning, at least the largest prints–185cm wide by 250cm tall–are. They generally do well at auction, though it sometimes feels like the ones that do better are the “starrier” ones, a notion that seems to play right into Ruff’s interest, inherited from his teachers, Berndt and Hilla Becher, that photographs are cliches, constructs of expectations [“my idea of what stars look like,” even.]
The photos Ruff used came from a project so conceptually ambitious and subjectively constrained, it’d do the Bechers proud. The ESO Southern Sky Atlas was a massive undertaking, an attempt begun in 1972 [images were taken from 1974-1987] to document the entire visible universe. Or at least the half of it visible from the Southern Hemisphere. And just the objects of enough magnitude to show up with the then-new 100-inch UK Schmidt Telescope and the 1m ESO telescope at La Cilla, Chile. And which could be seen on Kodak’s then-new, experimental, hypersensitized emulsion.
The resulting 1,000+ photos are at once evidence of photography’s futile limitations, and one of its greatest artistic achievements; they out-Becher the Bechers. The Sky Atlas is just one of several sky surveys over the 20th century. Each starts out with the same ambitious goal; each takes years of painstaking work; each results in images and objects that exhibit conceptual rigor and contemporary visual appeal in equal amounts; and as technology progresses, each is rendered utterly obsolete by the next survey. Particularly as astronomical data is digitized, the era of producing objects–glass negative plates and photographic prints–has died. Now it sits, at best, forgotten and neglected in university libraries and on storeroom shelves. At worst, it will be cleared out and dumped, replaced–people think–by a small stack of CD-ROMs or a web server.
For such projects, once-scientific milestones that represent an era’s pinnacle of our achievement, the literal attainment of the capacity of human vision, maybe the best thing for them is to stop being science and start being art.
Note to astronomical librarians: if you’re clearing out old sky surveys and atlases, please dump them my way.
[1] At least in English. Henning Engelke wrote about the Sterne series and the science-to-art spectrum, but it’s in German and locked in a in pdf. maybe this google translation of the reformatted html version will be comprehensible.

Just a Vegas-y two second video, but I wonder if this rain machine gives a hint of what’s coming this week at Olafur Eliasson’s MoMA/PS1 show.

Another of the things that Richard Serra said at LACMA last week has stuck with me was the artist’s call to arms for abstraction: basically, for artists in the 20th century, you’re either with us [i.e., Serra and Malevich] or you’re with the terrorists [i.e., Duchamp].

I was reminded by it, ironically, by the Times’ review of the new Tomma Abts show at the New Museum. By now, the spatial effect of seeing Abts’ arduously determined, small-scale, abstract paintings installed in large, white cubes is part of her experience. Abts’ room at the Carnegie International–which was also curated by Laura Hoptman–was an engrossing highlight; the paintings commanded the industrial space at greengrassi in London, too.] Ken Johnson writes, “Ms. Abts’s 14 small works look as though they died and went to heaven.”
But he also said, “Stylistically the paintings seem oddly out of sync with the present; they could be recently rediscovered works from the 1950s or ’60s.” That sense of anachronism seems inextricably tied to both the style–abstraction–and to the size. Though I can think of powerful exceptions, it seems like abstraction and smallness have been out of sync since WWII.

Abstractionist Thomas Nozkowski, who gets namechecked by Johnson–and whose resurgence is happening right now withfirst show after switching from Max Protetch to PaceWildenstein–talked in 2004 of deliberately choosing in the 70’s to paint on small board instead of giant canvas…

You can’t really understand artists of my generation until you factor the political atmosphere into any analysis of their work. I felt that I could no longer do big paintings that were for an audience of the very institutions that I then despised. The last thing I wanted to do was to paint for a museum, to paint for a bank lobby. I wanted to paint paintings that could fit in my friends’ rooms. So I started making 16 by 20 inch paintings that you would recognize today as my work, in 1975. These pictures, initially for political reasons, had roots in subject, in things that connected to the real world.

…and of the extremely skeptical response he received at the time, from curators, dealers, and his fellow artists:

I remember Steingrim Larssen who was then the director of the Louisiana Museum near Copenhagen coming by, and, to my surprise, he got excited about the paintings. This was 1975 or ’76, and he pulled a whole group out, said that he thought they were really interesting and then said, “Your psychiatrist told you to do these right?” He just thought it was some kind of therapy, he couldn’t imagine that this was serious work. I got a lot of that. Even Betty Parsons who was very supportive and loved young artists, she would flinch whenever I showed her a painting. So, I joined a co-op gallery to have a way to get them out of the studio and into the world.
…
There was an organization called The Organization of Independent Artists and they were attempting to subvert the gallery and museum system and all the established hierarchies. They had decided that each artist shown in their group shows would pick the next artists and so on. I was one of the artists chosen for the second show. I remember going to the organizational meeting and being told that the other artists had decided I couldn’t be in the show because the paintings weren’t serious.

Andy designed this postcard for the Walker Art Center, which is cool.
But the notes on the flickr photo are even cooler.
cf. the most heavily annotated photo on flickr [kottke]