In the fall of 2020, Deutsche Bank’s “Long-Term Asset Return Study” announced the Age of Disorder: an era of clashing superpowers, worsening inequality, faltering economies, quarreling generations, deteriorating ecosystems, and suffering populations. Instead of identifying a path from crisis to opportunity, the investment bank simply advised readers to avoid “extrapolating past trends.” Reading summaries of the report in the press, I was disoriented by the mix of dutiful doomsaying and eagerness to drop a buzzy, epoch-defining slogan, as if disorder were just another trend to be tagged and tracked. As I delved into the report’s accounts of debt, inflation, and the “new Cold War,” I wondered where people without high-performing assets might turn, beyond schemes to dispossess unrepentant boomers. To the heavens, perhaps? A writer I know had been chronicling the anxiety-fueled surge in astrology, and she pointed me to highly rational, distressed acquaintances who’d become preoccupied with star signs and tarot. I took note of teachers, economists, lawyers, and journalists who were adopting a symbolic system that ties human agency to the transit of celestial bodies, and artists who were creating horoscope-themed performances and paintings.

Though isolated and dejected, I found little comfort in recognizing myself as a sea goat with an exceptional aptitude for navigating emotional and material terrain, i.e., a Capricorn. I questioned the correlation between spirituality and disorder: How much fragmentation could people endure before giving up on the reassuring explanations of the zodiac? How much chaos could they hope to ward off by abandoning states, banks, and economists for astrologers (or apps offering “mystical services”)?

Of course, the appeal of alternatives to corrupt institutions, failed ideologies, and bogus authorities is understandably high, especially for those who haven’t figured out how to profit from collapse through investment hacks or astrology start-ups. Few artists in recent years have been as steadfast in countering the chaos and locating sources of cohesion as Tauba Auerbach. For the past two decades, Auerbach has sought universal structures and signs amid the polarization and breakdowns in communication. They have looked to science as others have looked to astrology: for a fount of meaning that stands apart from everyday life yet imprints each action, each organism. To Auerbach, everything is connected: the neurons that trigger our thoughts, the molecules that compose our bodies, the mechanisms that make up space-time, and the symbols that populate our expressions. Charting the connections in paintings, prints, sculptures, publications, musical instruments, timekeeping devices, custom software, typeface specimens, and a decommissioned fireboat, Auerbach has come to be known as a restless thinker and protean maker whose province is the entirety of human knowledge—a refreshing contrast to the current tendency in science and art to claim and defend a professional niche.

Auerbach’s survey at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, “S v Z,” which opens December 18 after being delayed due to the pandemic, presents the artist as an avatar of the era of particle accelerators, electron microscopes, and CAD renderings of polytopes. The exhibition samples several bodies of work that take on nothing less than the nature of being as theorized in various branches of science (and expressed in art, design, and ritual). The video Pilot Wave Induction III (2018) reimagines an experiment with droplets of oil bouncing on a vibrating pool—an illustration of an alternate (and recently disproven) theory of the quantum world in which particles “surf” on waves—to a soundtrack of frenetic, polyrhythmic drumming; the painting Shadow Weave – Chiral Fret Wave (2014) takes up the similarities between age-old decorative patterns and the construction of molecules, mapping one onto the other. Without characterizing the world as static or even knowable, Auerbach renders the disorder of our era as merely superficial—contrary to the fundamental state of things—if also menacing and insurmountable.

Auerbach sorts through research on perception, physics, consciousness, textile patterns, physiology, iconography, ritual, typeface design, and n-dimensional space in order to identify primordial figures that span nature and culture. They track the helix from the structure of DNA to the tissue that encloses muscles to the symbolic hand gestures found in Hindu rituals to the shape of the yin-yang emblem. They inventory ornamental motifs that span eons and continents, such as the fretting that crops up on Aztec temples, ancient Greek pottery, and Ming-era textiles. Another fixation is chirality, the property of figures that are nearly identical but slightly asymmetrical, such as rotating particles, human hands, and Möbius strips. To Auerbach, these shapes reveal “something…that is key to life,” as SFMoMA curator Jenny Gheith relays in her essay for the hefty exhibition catalogue. In making them—or the relations between them—legible, Auerbach evokes an “architecture of connectivity” that encompasses minds and bodies, individuals and societies, space and time.

Auerbach grew up in San Francisco, spending several years as a sign painter, and they are adept at transmuting abstruse concepts into concise, engrossing compositions. Having honed a visual language that is heavy on pulsating patterns, bold geometries, and swaths of eye-catching color, Auerbach seems to relish the challenge of devising the most alluring, graphical forms from the most head-spinning ideas. Consequently, Auerbach has come to stand for a style of conceptualism that appeals to TED Talk fans as much as art history PhDs, and features on design blogs as well as at the prestigious Paula Cooper Gallery, which represents the artist. The feedback loop between Auerbach’s intellectual inquiries and aesthetic preoccupations is apparent in the migration of the helix from phantasmal glass tabletop sculptures to a design for the Vienna State Opera House’s monumental safety curtain. Likewise, four-dimensional forms—ambassadors from a domain beyond human perception—appear in Auerbach’s elaborate handmade pop-up books and album covers for the avant-rock band Zs. Th