The Story Behind Jim Sanborn's Latest Artwork, 'Terrestrial Physics'

Brown didn't know why Sanborn wanted to achieve even that: "My initial reaction was, 'Sounds like a lot of work, and what are you going to get out of it in the end?' " Then Brown started thinking in fine-art terms, and changed his mind. "It sort of compares with an old Dutch master's painting of a kitchen table. . . . It's a still life of something someone put a lot of energy into."

That scientist's take comes surprisingly close to the opinion of Barbara London, a curator at the Museum of Modern Art in New York: "We talk about nuclear this and nuclear that -- the arms race -- but Jim is taking us into the lab . . . to the 'eurekas' that someone like Einstein achieved. To that moment, and the beauty of that moment."

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Sanborn's interest in simply "taking us there" puts him at the center of contemporary art. Some of the best recent work, often in photography, has abandoned obvious aesthetics -- anything that looks at all "arty" -- and has tried instead to bear straightforward witness to the most important aspects of the world around us.

"There are moments in history that people should be reminded of," Sanborn says.

That connects him to one of the oldest traditions in Western art. For centuries, "history painting" was the most prestigious form. Nothing mattered more than recapturing a crucial moment, from the day Florence beat Pisa at the battle of Cascina (Michelangelo, a Florentine, made a picture of it), to an early scientific demonstration of a vacuum (shown in the most famous painting by England's Joseph Wright of Darby).

The difference is that "Terrestrial Physics" doesn't simply show its moment. It delivers it up in working 3-D, complete with X-rays and lightning strikes. "The real object stimulates real thinking. Like picking up a real arrowhead -- you can feel the Indian is there," Sanborn says.

But MoMA's London notes that we're more comfortable with "abstractions, with depictions of reality," than with the real thing served up on a plate -- a bunch of lab equipment, in Sanborn's case. For many people, "science is seen as something other than art," she says. That's part of what makes Sanborn's work exceptional: "We're stretched in our understanding of what art is, and what the world is."

It is the ultimate in realistic art, meant to "stimulate a dialogue by confronting people with the real [expletive]," as Sanborn puts it.

Of course, "Terrestrial Physics" isn't the real thing, quite, which makes it all the more compelling and strange. It's a kind of "found-object art," but where the artist makes the object before finding it, says Adam Lerner, director of the Museum of Contemporary Art in Denver. "It's as though Andy Warhol were to have built a Campbell's Soup factory and had started making tomato soup."

Lerner will premiere Sanborn's new installation in his show "Energy Effects," scheduled for next June in Denver's first Biennial of the Americas.

He sees a connection between Sanborn and some of today's artistic activists, who incorporate real science into their art to drive home a political point -- about the failings of biotech, maybe, or the way we use our land. Yet there's a difference: Sanborn's work never preaches, it just shows.

"What is the comment? You don't know," Lerner says. "That is what makes it so good."

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Sanborn's art has always been about "making the invisible visible," the artist says. Over the years his sculptures have worked to reveal the processes of condensation, the geological forces of erosion, the hidden energies of magnetism, the concealments of cryptography, the secrets of Los Alamos and now, the unseen world inside the atom.

His father, an artist, was head of exhibitions at the Library of Congress. His mother was a concert pianist, and their house in Arlington was filled with cultural aristocrats. Sanborn succumbed to the art bug while a student at Randolph-Macon College in Virginia. That led to a graduate degree in sculpture, and by 1985 he'd shown at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, the Corcoran, the Baltimore Museum of Art and the Hirshhorn.

He started to make large-scale public sculpture, too, and that brought him his big break.

In 1990, Sanborn made a piece called "Kryptos" for the CIA campus in Langley, and it won him attention. The sculpture had a coded message cut into its massive copper plates, and to this day the agency's cryptographers, as well as obsessive amateurs all over, are working to decipher parts of its oracular texts. Dan Brown mentioned it in "The Da Vinci Code."

The fame of the CIA commission "funded me for all the years since," Sanborn says. It put him on the public-sculpture gravy train. He stopped living in his scruffy studio building in Northeast Washington (it's where he met his wife, Jae Ko, a well-known local sculptor), bought a house in Georgetown, designed a home in the Shenandoahs and continued to fund his more "serious" art, such as "Atomic Time."

But lately, the commissions have dried up. Today's selection panels, he complains, go for "decorative embellishments."

Sanborn says he's had to apply for Social Security, sell his D.C. studio and mountain home, get a reverse mortgage on his island and may have to rent out the Georgetown house.

Then there's the $50,000 he spent on "Terrestrial Physics," not Sanborn's most salable work, unless a major museum shows an interest in it.

That could yet happen. Says Lerner, "He's simply a great artist who should be able to show in any modern or contemporary art museum, anywhere."