Chemistry Reference
In-Depth Information
have shown in a previous paper, in popular visual culture images of
prototypical chemical glassware such as flasks and test-tubes are em-
blematic icons of chemistry, and indeed of all of science (Schummer &
Spector 2007).
Unlike chemical plant abstractions, however, the formal aspects of
many of these images have a strong allegiance to a particularly spare
mode of still life painting rather than to Machine Age precisionism. This
style, as exemplified by Giorgio Morandi in the mid twentieth
century
and later by William Bailey, express the neoclassical ideal of beauty
through their simplicity, balance, and harmony (Figure 23a/b). Both of
these painters worked within the still life tradition through their choice of
subject material (bottles, plates, cups, and so forth sitting on tables) but
at the same time altered the tradition by stripping it down to its bare es-
sentials, leaving behind the elaborately crowded still lifes of earlier peri-
ods that admit decay and death as a marker of time in the form of animal
carcasses, dying flowers, and insect infested fruit.
21
Tony Cragg makes explicit this connection between images of chemi-
cal apparatuses and still lifes in his series
Laboratory Still Life No. 1-4
(Figure 23c). Like Morandi and Bailey he strips the still life down to its
bare essentials (in his case objects without even a table), but unlike these
artists he employs chemical flasks as his subject material imparting a
sense of irony into his still lifes.
Like these artists' still lifes, chemical
'still lifes' are generally simple and well balanced compositions (see
Figure 22). Unlike Cragg's paintings, however, chemical 'still lifes' ex-
tract self-conscious irony through their institutional intentions. Instead,
like the chemicals and chemical industry that substitute for nature in their
manifestation of the sublime, an unintended irony emerges from the ten-
sion between beauty and danger in the chemical 'still lifes'. Renaissance
still lifes sometimes seductively depict idealized fruits and vegetables,
which on closer inspection actually show signs of decomposition and in-
sect infestation. Similarly chemical 'still lifes' work on two levels -
those of the beautiful and the grotesque. Unlike the explicit (and whimsi-
cal) grotesque aesthetic of Renaissance still lifes, however, the associa-
21
For example see Renaissance and Baroque period still lifes in Ebert-Schifferer 1999,
pp. 115-223.
