Painting as Sensuous Critique: Cornelia Hesse-Honegger’s Irradiated Insects
“We have only begun to discover the benefits of seeing science and art as one.”
For a long time now, some thirty-five years at least, Cornelia Hesse-Honegger has been collecting insects from the environs of nuclear power stations around the world, examining them through a microscope, and making detailed watercolour paintings of the numerous bodily distortions she has found inspecting such unlucky insects frequently reveals. Her critical practice is located between conventional classifications. From the perspective of science these paintings display, despite their obvious debt to careful observation, the subjective, and thus "unscientific" measure of the artist. In reading these pictures of heavily mutated insects as "art" orthodox science finds easy ammunition with which to refute their implicit claim of showing gross disturbances within nature. The received notion of the artist proposes that such a figure is concerned not with the real but with fantasy or exaggeration. And even when scientists accept the accuracy of the paintings, their implications are disputed or ignored. Science wants repetition; it demands it as proof of the state of things "out there", beyond opinion and the maverick gathering of "facts". These images show individual creatures whose deformities pose the problem of repetition and objective environmental effects in a manner science refuses to accept. But in documenting the mutations of numerous single insects, Hesse-Honegger's research does point to an objectively measurable order of distortion within nature. Low-level radiation leaks from power stations can have, cumulatively, immense effects.
Not only does the scientific community refuse to see these paintings as sufficiently objective – their status as art is also problematic. Hesse-Honegger trained as a scientific illustrator. Many would claim that illustration is not "art" but rather mere technique, a formulaic manner of record-making largely devoid of the innovative, critical and transformatory qualities associated with artistic production. For one audience Hesse-Honegger's work is invalidated by its "artistic" manner, while for another it is simply not artistic enough. The pictures' execution within the ambiguous medium of watercolour further problematises their classification. Watercolour painting is uncontroversial, and might even be claimed to be a somewhat prim or staid framework of presentation, particularly when contrasted with the various photography-based media utilised today. Yet it is precisely this distance from the authority invested in photographic and electronic technology that gives Hesse-Honegger's pictures their critical edge. There is something slightly shocking in seeing the nightmare creatures Hesse-Honegger depicts rendered in what Brian Eno has described as "that curious medium which seems to stand on the borderline between "Sunday painting" and "serious paintings."" The format of watercolour, Eno continues:
does not stipulate a particular emotional range, and presents itself to a perceiver in a kind of innocent and understated way ... It seems that at a time when the currency of the day is to engage in productions that are in some way epic … that which is simple and quiet suddenly becomes especially relevant.
A fictional rendition of Sherlock Holmes’ famous address: 221B Baker Street in North London
The scientific establishment normally confirms its speculative assertions through expensive, technically sophisticated experiments supported by high levels of both public and private funds, with those who question professional science all too easily dismissed as amateurs. There is, however, much to defend the practice of the amateur, particularly when the production of knowledge is rigidly formalised within officially-sanctioned institutions. Hesse-Honegger's scientific training protects her work from being seen as merely "amateur", though where her work does partake of this stance is in its challenge to establishment science. "The amateur's principal purpose", suggests R H Stephenson, "is to evaluate, to the best of his ability, the results arrived at by professional practitioners." The detective work involved in Hesse-Honegger's alternative assessment of scientific truth puts us in mind of Sherlock Holmes, whose unconventional methodologies invariably unearth a dissenting but pensive rendition of events. Holmes embodies the notion of the serious amateur, someone who refuses to take at face value the allegedly obvious. In "A Case of Identity" he proposes that "Perhaps I have trained myself to see what others overlook", surely an approach which might well be applied to Hesse-Honegger's own vigilant investigations. Holmes also observes that "It has long been an axiom of mine that the little things are infinitely the most important", an attention to detail that is also central to Hesse-Honegger's astringent research. Along with Gaston Bachelard, another perceptive critic of scientific convention, Hesse-Honegger might well propose that "the miniscule, a narrow gate, opens up an entire world."
There are several levels of aesthetic attention within Hesse-Honegger's work. At one end of the spectrum there is that of the artist herself, magnifying through her paintings the anomalies evident in a given insect. Here the invisible is made available for inspection by the unassisted eye. The paintings themselves are small, though the insect depicted is presented many times larger than its actual size. On occasion the watercolours are further enlarged through photographic means in order to be reproduced on posters, in magazines, or in books, a means of distributing images which is in no way anathema to Hesse-Honegger's deliberately didactic practice.
Hesse-Honegger's paintings have been displayed both in art galleries and museums of science, being more than sufficiently complex enough to hold their own in either context. The dialogue between the two supposedly opposed frameworks of science and art goes back several centuries, as Hesse-Honegger herself points out:
In the fifteenth century, art was 100 years ahead of science. Nowadays, that gap has almost completely closed, but I truly believe that we cannot really see something that has not been painted or put into an artistic form. It simply does not exist until then. I believe that the artist should be incorporated into the academic world, integrated into the learning of every subject.
The artist is, in this account, a figure capable of reassessing the validity of orthodox beliefs, be they scientific, religious, or of any other kind. He or she is also someone who makes things visible, gives to the flux of reality a temporary stability of meaning, isolating individual elements of the physical world to make them available for contemplation and critique. Criticism, in the present context, requires a move away from prevalent photographic representations of "the real". The invention of photography in the nineteenth century, together with its subsequent developments, remains a means of producing and stabilising meanings. As Jean-Francois Lyotard has noted, photographic and cinematic processes can accomplish better, faster, and with a circulation a hundred thousand times larger than narrative or pictorial realism, the task which [nineteenth century] academicism had assigned to realism: to preserve various consciousnesses from doubt.
In other words, what we take to be "the real" is not simply given or natural but is the result of a relentless, circumspect process of selection and presentation, carried out today by what Lyotard calls the "techno-sciences". Artists such as Hesse-Honegger operate in opposition to such technologically- entrenched forms of representation. Making plainly visible in her unostentatious aquarelles the structural mutations she sees through the lens of the microscope, Hesse-Honegger disrupts the seemingly-unstoppable chain of mutually-supporting images generated by establishment science. Her work provides a freeze-frame, literally allowing us a glimpse into a world the existence of which mainstream science strives to deny.
It is interesting, then, that Hesse-Honegger's challenge to the authority of scientific "truth" involves the redeployment of a pre-photographic means of expression. Why paint something when it can be photographed? Why utilise a subjective mode of recording when an objective means of storing information is at hand? These pictures are the result of numerous subjective choices, yet are true to the physical condition of each insect under scrutiny, as Hesse-Honegger highlights already-extant anomalies, making them directly visible. Perhaps in time the use of computer-based manipulations of photographic images will eventually make it readily evident that photography's status as a kind of unmarked mirror of the real is entirely false. Meanwhile, photography maintains its dominant, “reality-producing” position.
To suggest that all representations of "the real" are open to comparison and dispute is not to imply that Hesse-Honegger's paintings can furnish just whatever interpretation of them a given viewer might want. The pictures themselves are only one part of a broader practice that includes, importantly, the discourse around the work, including the artist’s public lectures and interviews. Science can deny the accuracy of Hesse-Honegger's pictures and their implications as much as it likes but, by its own standards of verification or dismissal, it must attend to them. The account of how Hesse-Honegger came to make these pictures cannot be divorced from the watercolours themselves. Implicit within this body of work and ideas is a claim for painting as a still plausible realism, and it is ultimately to models of practice such as those of Courbet and the Impressionists that Hesse-Honegger's work should be connected, as opposed to, for example, that of the Surrealists. The claim to truth made within Hesse-Honegger's practice is its most emphatic assertion, and the concerns she raises can readily be expressed within figurative painting, since the effects of radiation are, in the cases she records, easily visible.
"At all times," observes Theodor Adorno, the pictorial representation of nature seems to have been authentic only when it was nature morte: when it had the ability to interpret nature as an encoded historical message, if not as a message of death itself." Adorno's italicised term points to "dead nature" and to "still life", and if the passage does not specifically refer to Hesse-Honegger's paintings it might nonetheless be most pertinently applied. The tragically ambiguous phrase "nature morte" seems eerily apt, as does Adorno's noting of the authentic status afforded by those works holding an encrypted historical signal or warning sign.
Nicolas Poussin, The Arcadian Shepherds: even in the idyll of Arcadia there is Death
The subtlety and beauty of Hesse-Honegger's images contrast sharply with what they show, which is the beauty of nature, its erstwhile formal orderliness, in acute dissolution. Here a sense of the surreal does creep in, as though we are looking at creatures out of Bosch, Lautreamont or Verne. Painting attractive watercolours of grossly deformed insects has, in itself, a certain monstrosity, conceptually so if not necessarily at the level of the retinal. Poussin's 1639 painting of "The Arcadian Shepherds" finding proof of corruption at the heart of what had appeared to be a paradise on earth is another image to which Hesse-Honegger's work can be compared, for both artists show that within the quiet, everyday order of things there may well lurk a darker force, one implying total desolation.
Figurative painting is an odd medium in which to depict something invisible: the radiation leaked from nuclear power stations. In recording the deleterious consequences of this strange spectral energy Hesse-Honegger unexpectedly echoes the words of a prominent poet. "Paint," wrote Mallarme in 1863, "not the thing, but the effect it produces." These words perfectly describe Cornelia Hesse-Honegger's critical and artistic process.
Peter Suchin
This essay is adapted from “Forces of the Small: Painting as Sensuous Critique”, included in Cornelia Hesse-Honegger, The Future’s Mirror, Locus+, Newcastle upon Tyne, 1997.
References
Thomas S Kuhn, The Essential Tension, University of Chicago Press, 1977, p. 243.
Brian Eno in "Peter Schmidt and Brian Eno", Arts Review, Vol. XXIX, No. 25, 9 December, 1977, p. 343.
R H Stephenson, "Last Universal Man - or Wilful Amateur?", in Elizabeth M Wilkinson (Ed.), Goethe Revisited, John Calder, 1984, p. 56.
Arthur Conan Doyle, quoted in Michael and Mollie Hardwick, The Sherlock Holmes Companion, John Murray, 1962, p. 154.
Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space, Beacon Press, 1969, p. 155.
Cornelia Hesse-Honegger, quoted in Jeremy Hall, "A terrible beauty", The Independent Magazine, 30 March, 1996, p. 11.
Jean-Francois Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: a Report on Knowledge, Manchester University Press, 1984, p. 74.
T W Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, RKP, 1984, pp. 100, 114.
Erwin Panofsky, "Et in Arcadia Ego: Poussin and the Elegiac Tradition", in Panofsky, Meaning in the Visual Arts, Penguin, 1970.
Stephane Mallarme, quoted in Anthony Hartley, "Introduction", in Hartley (Ed.), Mallarme, Penguin, 1970, p. ix (translation modified).
