Abstracting Nature, Literally

In one of the first posts to this blog I looked at the winning photographs in the 2007 Olympus BioScapes competition, a photography contest for biologists, and pondered whether they could be considered "art".  It is an interesting question, and looking through the 2008 winners from the same competition, I couldn't help but notice how much some of the photographs reminded me of images and sculpture from contemporary visual art. 

Great science photography has always fascinated the mind and the eye, whether through the exquisitely detailed frozen moments of Harold Edgerton, the spellbinding symmetry and patterning of Felice Frankel, or the sweeping, vibrant, glowing space-scapes from the Hubble Space Telescope.  Part of the fascination with these images is believing in their objectivity; they show something real about the world, something nobody can disagree with.  Yet take these connotations away from the images, and you'll find that they don't quite stand up on their own as artwork.  Or to put it another way, if an artist had made them, we just wouldn't like them as much.

What strikes me about some of these BioScapes images is that they almost look like they were made by artists, not rigorously objective photographic recordings made by scientists.  The image to the left, by Michael Franklin, bubbles with layers of structure, ordered almost haphazardly and shining as though made of jeweler's wire, yet calling to mind a plant cell, or a tiny tree rings.  The fascinating patterning, large scale structure with small scale complexity, stunning focus and contrast, and subtle but very effective coloring all distract from the fact that this really is the cross section image of a tiny plant stem.  Below are two other images from the BioScapes competition: Volvox cell colonies by Gerd Gunther on the left, and a wild cucumber by Victor Sykora to the right.

 

We see some very similar aesthetic trends being explored in contemporary visual art.  Anna Hepler's fragile but tension-filled wire sculptures and drawings (seen to the left) explore non-repeating geometries in ways very reminiscent of biological structures or the moments right after an explosion.  Roland Flexner's drawings (example on the right) with ink bubbles tackle similar ideas by literally recording tiny explosions on paper.  Frances Richardson's delicate graphite drawings (below, with detail) create organic, subtle forms from a dizzying complexity of meticulous marks.

The work of each of these contemporary visual artists refers strongly to images from science (Flexner certainly owes much to Edgerton, for example), and quite possibly also refer to, or are inspired by, current research trends in nonlinear dynamics, complex systems, and emergent behavior that attempt to tease some sense out of chaotic structures and behavior.

Artists can use scientific concepts to add further dimension to their work, which is arguably the real key to making good artwork.  When a painting or sculpture not only captures the eye but also suggests that the forms abstractly relate to natural systems, the viewing experience is deepened.  In fact, the crux here may be how "abstractly" this connotation is formed.  A literal explanation of a scientific concept can be interesting and quite dazzling, but a Hubble photograph of a galaxy is not the same as the artwork above, no matter how glowing, swirling, or colorful it is.  Some of these BioScapes images are much closer to artwork because they are so abstracted.  They almost become something other than the actual objects that have been photographed, by only loosely suggesting a connection.  This is precisely where we find exciting combinations of science and art: in works that strike a nimble balance between the literal and the abstract.

Anna Hepler's image "Spheres" comes from her website, and Roland Flexner's "#1" and Frances Richardson's "060307" come from their respective websites.

Comments

[Joyce]

Your phrase "they become something other than the actual objects that have been photographed" seems like the crux of the matter--whether a biological (or astronomical) image can transcend its "realness" and show us something new . . . fascinating post!

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