Chemistry Reference
In-Depth Information
visual tropes in both artistic spheres.
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These visual tropes were eventu-
ally subsumed by many commercial photographers and, as illustrated in
Figure 20, are still employed today.
Like the work of the machine purists, close-up images of chemical
plants appear representational but in fact rely heavily on the formal
canon of abstract art, including an emphasis on primary geometric forms
juxtaposed into complex arrays akin to the work of the cubists. In theory,
the geometric nature of these images reflects the order and rationality of
the machines they depict, but, as Rutsky (1999, pp. 73-101) has argued,
their relationship to abstract modernism ultimately separates their tech-
nological function from their form shifting them into a purely aesthetic
realm. In their close-cropped askew perspective these images, like Ma-
chine Age photographs themselves, also reveal their connection to the
abstract movement of avant-garde photography made popular by the
Bauhaus photographer László Moholy-Nagy and others in the 1920s and
1930s who “strove to separate objects from their natural settings” by em-
ploying “disorienting viewpoints, radical cropping, strong figure-ground
relationships, [and] compositions oriented on the diagonal” (Light 1995,
p. 97).
4.2 Glassware: the chemical still life
Like the close-up images of chemical plants, many contemporary images
of chemical apparatus play on the abstract tradition. Initially they appear
simply representational, but closer inspection shows that they are not. As
in Figure 22 the prototypical contemporary chemical 'still life' photo-
graph is composed of a collection of various flasks and test-tubes con-
taining colored liquids sitting on an indeterminate surface (
i.e.
not clearly
a table or lab bench) or, more often, shot from an odd angle and/or so
closely cropped that there is no recognizable surface. Their focus on
decontextualized glassware provides little clue to how the equipment is
manipulated by people in a laboratory environment. Instead, these im-
ages are intended to represent the discipline of chemistry. In fact, as we
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Sheeler, in particular, made this connection between his art and American industry
explicit with his commissioned paintings of the Ford Motor Company.
