Down in the storm cellar

FOR a museum whose stated mission is to “inspire wonder, discovery, and responsibility for our natural and cultural worlds” -- I’m quoting from the business cards of the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County -- the work of Los Angeles artist Susan Silton would seem an ideal fit.

One recent series, “Aviate,” drew on images from early 20th century bird books. A video piece, “hemidemisemiquaver,” explored the physics of motion. (Silton created the piece by holding a video camera and spinning in circles.) The two series included in the museum’s “Fast Forward: Twisters and Tornadoes by Susan Silton” look to meteorology. In its attention to nature and the mechanics of physical phenomena, the work embodies just the sort of engaged curiosity the museum aims to cultivate in its visitors.

The show itself, however, is less than inspiring.

The problem has nothing to do with the work, which is thoroughly compelling. “Tornado in a Jar,” the more recent of the two series on display (dated 2007), consists of seven poster-size images taken from a video recording of a classic science experiment in which water, soap and vinegar are vigorously swirled in a jar to produce a tornado-like funnel. Captured at close range, each funnel fills the entire frame, skewing the sense of scale while emphasizing the awesome elegance of the form itself.

The other series, “Twisters” (2003), involves digitally manipulated photographs of tornadoes. The originals were taken by professional storm chasers; Silton casts them in a moody black and white and reduces them to an intimate, almost precious scale (5 inches by 7 inches, floating in a 30-by-24-inch frame). What’s striking, again, is the strange elegance of the funnel cloud form, floating above the Earth like a piece of spontaneously generated sculpture, culled from the air.

The problem with the show is the unfortunate manner in which it’s installed: in two parallel wings of a heavily trafficked basement hallway, wedged between a pair of elevators, a men’s bathroom and the security desk on one side, and a conference room, women’s bathroom and a cafe on the other. Despite a new-looking coat of mauve paint, the space has a dingy, transitory quality, as conducive to the contemplation of art as an airport corridor. For all the foot traffic, I didn’t see anyone so much as glance at the pictures over the course of my visit -- though several did stop to drop coins into the large, funnel-style collection box that is also crowded into the space and that apparently is a far more enticing demonstration of the physics of the twister.

To stop and consider the work, it seemed, would be to risk precipitating a pedestrian pileup.

To add insult to injury, every one of the 10 “Twister” prints was badly smudged on the day that I visited -- this a mere three days after the show opened. (The other, unframed prints are fortunately protected by a low railing.)

These may be rather petty complaints, but they point to a deeper and more difficult question: What is the purpose of including art here in the first place? If it is to showcase the work, to introduce it to an audience that may not see it otherwise and help to facilitate a genuine dialogue between art and science, then it seems worth coming up with a space where that could actually occur. But if the goal is simply to explain the science (the wall text includes several paragraphs on the mechanics of tornadoes) and take care of a little interior decorating in the process, a didactic mural would do just as well, with considerably less insult to the conceptual complexity of a project like Silton’s.

Though surely well intentioned, the exhibition risks perpetuating many of the assumptions it should be combating: namely, that art is what comes after the real work of science and history, to be enjoyed by those who have the leisure to linger awhile on their way to the cafe, rather than a functionally comparable pursuit, equally integrated and engaged with the human experience.

Last year’s “Sonic Scenery” -- an exhibition in which sound artists were invited to create auditory accompaniments to the museum’s dioramas (fantastic artworks in themselves, incidentally) -- proves that more creative solutions are possible. Here’s hoping for more along those lines in the future. The intersection of art and science is too rich a territory to be relegated to the basement.

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‘Fast Forward: Twisters and Tornadoes by Susan Silton’

Where: Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County, 900 Exposition Blvd., Los Angeles

When: 9:30 a.m. to 5 p.m. Mondays through Fridays, 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Saturdays and Sundays; closed April 21.

Ends: May 18

Price: $2 to $9

Contact: (213) 763-DINO; www.nhm.org