Chemistry Reference
In-Depth Information
3.3 Chemical plants as sublime landscape
Even with these traditions in mind, however, photographs of the chem-
ical landscape may not initially impress the viewer with an experiential
sensibility beyond that associated with the magnitude of the plant. From
an art historically informed perspective, however, it is clear that the
composition of such photographs introduces an emotive element which
links their lineage to the sublime landscape images of the eighteenth and
nineteenth centuries. Borrowing from the atmospheric effects of J.M.W.
Turner and the grandiosity of Casper David Friedrich (Figure 19), they
are expansive in scope, employ the sky as “the key note, the standard of
scale, and the chief organ of sentiment” (Constable 1998, pp. 50f.), and
operate on a vertical rather than horizontal axis. In addition to displaying
the proportional conventions of sublime landscape painting, the use of
special lighting effects in chemical landscapes has a clear allegiance to
the atmospheric effects found in Romantic era industrial landscape paint-
ings. As epitomized by Loutherbourg's
Coalbrookdale by Night
(Figure
13a), this subgenre of paintings represents some of the most dramatic
atmospheric effects from the sublime landscape tradition.
Previous studies of landscape have shown that artists' representations
of 'natural' landscapes are not naïve, realistic representations of nature,
but are undergirded with cultural narratives (
e.g.
Mitchell 2002). Thus,
for many art historians and literary critics even the most 'natural' land-
scape paintings and photographs express social hierarchies, labor rela-
tions, and imperialism in such a way that they effectively contain class
conflict, labor unrest, and concerns about national identity - in the same
way that modern chemical landscape photography contains fears con-
cerning labor practices, industrial safety, and environmental contamina-
tion. Within the paradigm of landscape painting, nature itself is a human
construct laden with conventions that make it comprehensible as 'land-
scape', and artistic representations of the landscape overtly articulate
these conventions. Similar conventions are smuggled into the decidedly
unnatural vistas of the chemical landscape.
By acknowledging the constructed nature of landscape and the articu-
lation of its visual conventions in landscape painting, we can understand
visual representations of the industrial landscape as an extension of tradi-
