An Imaginative Connection Between Art and Science

Whether you’re stuck in traffic on the 405 Freeway or visiting an art exhibition that doesn’t seem to make sense, a little patience goes a long way. Nowhere is this truer than at the Santa Monica Museum of Art, whose walls have been covered with computer-printed diagrams, hand-drawn flow charts, neatly typed explanations, complicated physics equations and photographic illustrations.

Four vitrines, packed with books, pamphlets and professional correspondences, form an “X” in the center of the main gallery. Four monitors, embedded in the walls, show animated sequences of atomic particles interacting with one another. Two inflatable models hang from the rafters, and a dozen brightly colored flotation devices, also blown up to maximum capacity, are stacked in various corners.

To scan the scene is to know, very quickly, that someone has gone to great lengths to put forward some pretty ambitious propositions about the nature of the universe. To decide whether these arguments hold water takes a lot more time, which is where patience comes in. Ultimately, the conclusions you come to depend on your view of the relationship between art and science, and the role the imagination plays in both.

Organized by Margaret Wertheim, an independent scholar and frequent radio commentator whose publications include “Pythagoras’ Trousers” and “The Pearly Gates of Cyberspace: A History of Space From Dante to the Internet,” the exhibition is long on words and short on images. Titled “Lithium Legs and Apocalyptic Photons: The Imaginative World of James Carter,” it is a three-dimensional version of two books by the self-taught physicist, “The Other Theory of Physics” and “Gravity Does Not Exist.”

As you make your way through the information-laden displays, details about Carter’s all-encompassing theory fall into place. Like the Greek philosophers Thales and Anaxemenes, and the medieval theologian Robert Grosseteste, Carter proposes that a single key unlocks the secrets of the universe. But where his predecessors looked to water, air or light as their primary principles, he turns to the “circlon,” a molecular structure shaped like a bicycle tire’s inner tube.

Carter describes circlons as atomic Lego blocks, interlocking rings that snap together to form all the elements. The most impressive component of the installation is his wall-size version of Dmitri Mendeleev’s periodic table. In Carter’s hands, modern science’s most recognizable icon maintains its logic and internal consistency even after it’s transformed into a chart that resembles 112 juxtaposed subway maps, each more colorful and complex than the last.

Starting with hydrogen and helium, whose particles are depicted three-dimensionally, the chart switches to two dimensions at lithium. As more information is compressed into each element’s page-size box, symmetry increases. By the time you get to actinium, thorium and protactinium (the 89th, 90th and 91st elements), you may need reading glasses to follow the neat patterns of circlons, whose crisscrossed structures mimic the formation of crystals.

In classic overachiever style, Carter has made a table that improves upon the original. His version includes nine additional elements, eight unnamed ones and circlonium, that tie up loose ends and round out the whole at a more aesthetically satisfying 112.

Other displays outline other aspects of Carter’s theories. In “The Creation of the Universe in Eight Days,” he takes issue with the big-bang theory, proposing, instead, that the universe started when two massive circlons mated. A series of divisions and fusions followed, leading, one step at a time, to the present state of the universe. At first, the claim seems to be nuttier than a fruitcake, but the deeper you dive into it, the less farfetched it becomes. Too many details correspond to known facts for it to be utter nonsense.

The beauty of Carter’s system is that it is mechanistic. In it, bodies made of matter interact with one another; no invisible forces exert mysterious powers over things. Like Christiaan Huygens, who invented the pendulum clock, and James Clerk Maxwell, who tried to develop a mechanical theory of electricity and magnetism, Carter seeks to explain things simply and clearly. In all of his work, there’s very little that’s counterintuitive.

His system’s biggest glitch involves gravity, which he just can’t make sense of by ordinary means. But rather than letting gravitation bring his theory crashing to the ground, he makes an end run around it.

According to Carter, all matter is constantly expanding, increasing in size like an unpoppable balloon into which air is constantly being pumped. Thus, objects do not fall to the ground. The surface of the Earth rises to meet them.

At this point, you can’t help but think that Carter is a charlatan whose only goal is to pull a fast one. You are, after all, in a museum of contemporary art. And you don’t have to be a rocket scientist to know that this is a place where the emperor’s new clothes are sometimes displayed.

But there’s something about Carter’s project that tells you it’s not a hoax. For one thing, it doesn’t draw its legitimacy from the museum. More important, it’s clear that Carter began to develop his theories without museums in mind, and that he will continue his life’s work whether or not these institutions exhibit the results of his research.

The inflated airbags stacked in the corners tip you off to the profoundly idiosyncratic world in which Carter lives. These red, yellow, orange and burgundy sacks, which come in all shapes and sizes, are Carter Lift Bags, patented tools designed to raise objects from the bottoms of large bodies of water.

Carter began to develop them in the 1970s, when he was an abalone diver off the coast of Catalina and was looking for an easier way to get his catch to the surface. Now he manufactures a line of lift bags in a converted restaurant on his wooded campground in Washington. He also makes custom models for NASA, the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, the Navy, Coast Guard and the Bellagio casino in Las Vegas.

The poetry of Carter’s project snaps into focus when you realize that his anti-gravitational theory (and its corollary of the Earth’s expanding and rising surface) exactly matches the mechanics of the invention that bears his name. His exhibition is a hilarious case of historical materialism in action.

A more famous mechanistic thinker was Marx, who argued that material conditions, namely a society’s means and mode of production, shape its prevailing ideas. Carter’s installation makes the same point, only much more humorously than the 19th century economist, whose theories still shape the thinking of art-world academics.

Lighten up, Carter’s seriously playful work suggests. With a little levity you might even give gravity, or at least gravitas, a run for its money.

In a small side gallery, a videotaped film by Wertheim and Cameron Allan fleshes out the installation’s ideas. This insightful and entertaining portrait of Carter ranks among the year’s art highlights. If patience isn’t your strong suit, start here.

Alternating between computer-animated displays of spinning circlons and lucid interviews, the film presents some of Carter’s many faces: gold-miner, filmmaker, cave-digger, repairman, entrepreneur, trailer-park manager and inventor. One of its best sequences features his smoke-ring machines, motorized devices that blow smoke rings the size of truck tires into the night sky.

Although he claims to be testing the mobility of circlons, it looks as if he’s just having a good time. Throughout the film, Carter shows himself to be a levelheaded eccentric, the kind of pragmatic, freethinking individual you’d want to have at your side if you were trapped on a deserted island. Making a virtue of loopiness, he demonstrates that wild ideas make the world go round.

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“Lithium Legs and Apocalyptic Photons: The Imaginative World of James Carter,” Santa Monica Museum of Art, 2525 Michigan Ave., Bergamot Station, Santa Monica, (310) 586-6488, through June 9. Closed Mondays.