Chemistry Reference
In-Depth Information
Apart from their specific didactic purpose, however, images of chem-
ical apparatus assumed a life of their own in the broader visual culture.
Starting in the late eighteenth
century, they drew visual associations be-
tween chemistry, experiment, and Lavoisien empiricism (Stafford 1996,
pp. 91-110), even though, as Beretta (2000) notes, the illustrations some-
times represented anachronistic chemical apparatus. They helped chemis-
try to assume the epistemological status of a respected science, to estab-
lish a professional identity, and to popularize itself to a broader public. In
the late nineteenth
century the iconography for representing chemistry as
a scientific discipline was fully developed, employing the same elements
we find today. These included static and decontextualized drawings of
flasks and test-tubes without any indication of how to use them (Knight
1996). Like the subjects of the Machine Age, the depicted apparatus be-
came symbolically abstract and dissociated from its actual function.
Today's photographs of chemical glassware have largely replaced the
woodcuts and etchings of earlier centuries, but still operate on two se-
mantic levels. On the one hand, like Cragg's still lifes, they retain the
representational content and associations of nineteenth-century chemis-
try. On the other, they symbolically represent contemporary chemistry.
Thus, images of glassware filled with colored liquids are such potent in-
dicators of chemistry that they are used as
the
icons of science, although
the chemistry they represent is generally outmoded.
22
Moreover, once
abstracted from their representational meaning, the images could become
subject to graphical analysis and rearrangement both in photographic
self-representations of chemistry and in fine art. Indeed, we contend that
these images' conservative, backward-looking, symbolism has ironically
led to their thoroughly modern rendition, allowing them to be loosed
from any representational context and brought into the realm of pure
aesthetics.
22
Of course chemists still use flasks (and sometimes even test-tubes), but like all sci-
ences at this point in the history, chemistry would presumably be much more accu-
rately represented by complex instrumentation.
