Insectopedia
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For example, Chris Busby, a British physical chemist and anti-nuclear campaigner, emphasizes two critical but overlooked variables: cell development and the random behavior of artificial radioactivity.12 Under normal conditions, Busby argues, a cell (any cell) is hit by radiation approximately once a year. If the cell is in its normal quiescent mode, it is fairly robust. However, during times of active replication—a repair mode that can be triggered by various forms of stress—the same cell is highly susceptible to radiation. At those moments, it exhibits considerable genomic instability, and two radioactive “hits” produce a far greater effect than just one.
Moreover, Busby says, the ingestion of radioactive materials through food and water has effects quite distinct from those of external exposure. Certain types of internal radiation associated with, for instance, drinking contaminated milk can produce multiple hits on an individual cell within hours. If a cell receives a second hit of artificial radiation while it is in active replication mode, he claims, it is up to 100 times more likely to mutate.
In Busby’s second-event theory, the level of vulnerability of a cell to radiation is a function of its state of development at a given moment. And this vulnerability is further exacerbated by the random, discontinuous waves characteristic of artificial radiation. Cornelia explained the randomness of artificial radiation to me using the analogy of bullets: it doesn’t matter how many are fired, whom they’re fired by, or even when and where they’re fired; you need only be hit by one at the wrong time and in the wrong place to suffer its effect. The ICRP linear curve assumes a constant distribution of particles and a predictable effect. If, as many argue, those are invalid assumptions, the levels of environmental susceptibility to the effects of radioactive contamination are likely to be dramatically elevated—indeed, they are likely sufficient to explain the epidemiological evidence of elevated mortality in human, animal, and plant populations in sites subject to more or less routine radioactive emissions.
Low-level-radiation campaigners would no doubt have predicted the experts’ response to Cornelia’s articles in the Tages-Anzeiger Magazin. Reiterating the official position that the fallout from Chernobyl was too small to induce mutations, scientists stated simply that the explanation must lie elsewhere. Cornelia’s methodology, they argued, did not adequately control for alternative causal factors, such as pesticides and parasites. She offered no comparative baseline, no reference habitat free of contaminants in which a normal rate of variation for the species could be measured. In fact, they pointed out (ignoring the limited character of her claims), she offered no numbers at all, either for dosage or for incidence of deformities.13 The scientists dismissed her evidence, rebuffed her appeals to their expertise, and retreated without explanation from the occasional unguarded expressions of interest. It was a scenario she would witness repeatedly: “I showed my bugs and flies to all the professors with whom I had previously worked. I even brought the director of the Zoological Institute, a professor of genetics, a little tube of deformed living flies. He didn’t bother to look at it, and said an investigation would cost too much time and money. He said that since it had already been confirmed that small doses of radiation would not cause any morphological damage, the expense was in no way justifiable.”14
From the outside, of course, it seems almost too obvious: her amateur status, her gender, the sensitivity of the issue, the closed character of the industry. Always the same questions: What qualified her to attribute causality to the deformities she found? What qualified her to distinguish mutations induced by radiation from the naturally occurring variation expected in any given population? What qualified her to develop her own methodology? What qualified her to feed the hysteria of a public made paranoid by Chernobyl? What qualified her to contradict those who were qualified? How could she live with the rash of abortions her reports had provoked among women in Ticino?
But beyond the scientific community—and, it is important to say, among the few scientists already sympathetic to the anti-nuclear movement—the response was far from entirely hostile. She made radio appearances and received large quantities of encouraging mail. After the first article, the opposition German Social Democratic Party called for an investigation into the local effects of Chernobyl. After the second, the Swiss government, forced to respond to public pressure, agreed to sponsor a doctoral dissertation on the health of heteropterans across the federal territory.
Nonetheless, the antagonism of the scientists unsettled her, and perhaps we should remember just how controversial nuclear power was in Europe following Chernobyl. The Swiss anti-nuclear movement was vocal and politically effective, and Cornelia’s bombshells exploded in the media just as activists were canvassing for the 150,000 signatures required to enforce a third referendum on the restriction of the industry. The first two votes (in 1979 and 1984) had been narrowly defeated, but this one, held in September 1990, would result in a ten-year moratorium on the construction of new reactors. It was impossible to intervene in this issue and remain innocent. Yet Cornelia appears to have thought of herself still as within the fold of science, if not openly acknowledged as a lay expert then at the least as a fellow traveler contributing through her skills as an artist. Perhaps she was a little too independent for the supporting role expected of the scientific illustrator, but wasn’t she nonetheless a collegial participant in a common project of investigation and understanding?
She finds a cicada with a grotesque stump growing from one knee and takes it to a former professor. “Years before,” she wrote, “I had collected insects with him for the fauna courses at the university. I had learned from him how to set up a professional collection of insects. It was his schooling that had made me the meticulous scientific illustrator I had become.” The professor admits he has never seen this kind of deformity before but dismisses its significance and scolds her like a child for the articles in the Tages-Anzeiger. Don’t think you are a scientist just because you have drawn pictures for me and my colleagues, he tells her.15
The closed ranks shocked her. The reactions bore the marks of an expulsion. It was a decisive moment, and again it seems that—to use her word—she was “possessed,” taken over by a visceral conviction of vision, of seeing something invisible to others, seeing the minatory sicknesses of these invisible insects. Remembering those turbulent months, she wrote, “I knew a task had found me.”16
I don’t want to write a hero story. But let me tell you what she did. In Sweden, she was amazed to discover that no one was investigating the effects of Chernobyl on animals and plants. Returning to Switzerland, she reviewed the criticism of her first article. If, as the scientists insisted, low doses of radionuclides were not producing these disturbances, there should be none around the famously clean Swiss nuclear plants. Unsure of what to expect, she traveled to the cantons of Aargau and Solothurn and hiked around their five nuclear installations. The deformed bugs she found at every turn were the subject of her second article in Tages-Anzeiger Magazin, a focus of even more controversy than the first. “I believe,” she wrote in her conclusion, “we must pursue [the causes of these disturbances] with the best and most sophisticated methods at our disposal, and with a level of funding I cannot afford. With my illustrations I can only point out changes. I make them visible. With this work I allow myself to point to a crisis in the investigation of the effects of artificial low-level radiation, and further to call for scientific clarification at a broader level. I cannot go further with the means at my disposal. But more detailed investigations are both possible and necessary.”17
4.
The garden bug is from Küssaberg, in Germany, close to the Leibstadt nuclear power plant in Aargau. The entire neck plate is distorted; the bulging blister on its left includes an unusual black growth. Cornelia’s painting is delicate but meticulous. In color—many shades of gold—and at full size (this one is seventeen by twelve inches; some are far larger), it is strikingly beautiful.
The composition, unsparing, is typical. On fea
tureless white backgrounds, she emphasizes the insects’ architectural properties, their structure and monumentality as well as their decorative surface. The poses are formal and explicitly contrived. She repositions legs and wings to expose deformity; often, for the same reason, she leaves out limbs or body segments or just sketches them in outline.
Leaving behind scientific illustration, which, she explains, relies on nineteenth-century techniques of “light and shadow,” she adopted the color perspective pioneered by Cézanne and the cubists, creating spatial effects through relations between colors (employing contrasts of intensity, temperature, and value) and—like Goethe, Rudolph Steiner, and Josef Albers—attending to the subjective and relational nature of color perception. Light and shadow, she says, is “historical”: it captures one particular moment, freezing light and, with it, time; color perspective, on the contrary, is timeless, outside time. Then she shows me how, as she paints, she shifts the position of the insect under her microscope so that the finished image is a composite of several angles, again calling up the cubists and their multifaceted renderings of simultaneity.
These watercolors are realistic but not naturalistic. With rare exceptions, her animals lack all animation. Their physicality foregrounded, they have the aura of specimens. Each painting is a portrait, and each insect is a subject, a specific individual. She tells me, “I like that the insect can be itself. That’s why I choose to paint the individual as it is. I could, for instance, paint one that has five different defects that I find in an area. I don’t do this. I want to show the individual.” On display, the insect hangs, massive, stunning in its detail, supplemented by a label that identifies the date and site of its collection, as well as its irregularities, and that grounds the atemporal image in time, place, and politics. Sharing much of the visual grammar of the biological sciences, the paintings seem mutely dispassionate, resolutely documentary. But so thoroughly in the world, they shimmer with emotion.
Cornelia once told me that the first time she saw a deformed leaf bug, so tiny, so damaged, so irrelevant, she lost her mental balance, her perspective, her sense of scale and proportion. For a moment, she was unsure if she was looking at herself or the animal. She paused in her narrative. “Who cares about leaf bugs?” she said. “They’re just nothing.” She was recalling her earlier life, as the teenage daughter of famous artists, describing how she hung back in the shadows, unobserved, as her parents entertained Mark Rothko, Sam Francis, Karlheinz Stockhausen, and other luminaries in New York, Paris, and Zürich (“No one would even see me or recognize me…. I would never interfere”). And she was recalling how in twenty years her husband never visited her studio, and how, when her son was born, the doctor came into her room and made a drawing for her to break the news that her child had a club foot, and how, when she saw that first deformed leaf bug in Sweden, it had a crippled foot too. And she was telling me how, when she saw that first crippled insect, in the shock of all those experiences colliding so suddenly with such unanticipated force, she had to fight physically to stop herself from throwing up.
And just a few moments later, in the failing afternoon sunlight in her Zürich apartment, she said, “In the end, the picture is everything. Nobody sees the insect itself.” And it was my turn to pause, because I didn’t quite know what she meant. It sounded like a lament, a disappointment that her images are too instantly domesticated, reduced to the iconic, that they too easily make the leap from invisibility to enormity, too effectively stand in for human fears, too readily bring self-concern to the fore, so that the individual insect—the one she found (“It’s heaven on earth!”), captured (“They can move very quickly”), killed with chloroform (“I always tell myself this is the last summer”), pinned, labeled, added to the thousands already in her collection, and finally came to know so intimately through microscope and brushes—seems again and again to be overlooked, to become lost.
But then I remembered Cornelia saying that if she were freed of the compulsion to paint deformities, if she were free to paint whatever she chose, her work would follow the path laid out in the painting of the mutant eyes she completed before her life was interrupted by the journey to Österfärnebo. And I realized that her lament was not only for the loss of the individual insect. In that painting, she offers the insect not as being or subject but as its antithesis: the insect as aesthetic logic, as coalescence of form, color, and angle. This is work that draws explicitly on her history in concrete art, an international movement centered in postwar Zürich, in which—because of the prominence in the group of her father, Gottfried Honegger—she received her initial aesthetic training. (Cornelia’s mother, Warja Lavater, was widely known as an innovative graphic artist and maker of artists’ books.)
Concrete paintings tend toward geometric patterns, high-contrast color blocks, glassy planes, and the refusal of figurative or even metaphorical reference. Kazimir Malevich’s programmatic White on White (1918), a white square painted on a white ground, is perhaps the movement’s founding document. Casting themselves as aesthetic radicals breaking with the conservatism of representational art, Max Bill, Richard Paul Lohse, and the other founders of concrete art looked to Soviet constructivism, to the geometry of Mondrian and De Stijl, and to the formalism of Bauhaus. In his 1936 manifesto, Konkrete Gestaltung (Concrete Formation), Bill wrote, “We call those works of art concrete that came into being on the basis of their own innate means and laws—without borrowing from natural phenomena, without transforming those phenomena, in other words: not by abstraction.”18
Abstract art, searching for a visual language based in symbols and metaphor, is still “object painting,” is still tied to the object it mimics, is still asking what that thing is, how it can be made sense of, how it can be communicated. For concrete artists, the work should speak of nothing but itself. It should reference nothing outside itself. It should leave the viewer complete interpretive freedom. Its signs and its referents should be one and the same: form, color, quantity, plane, angle, line, texture.
From the 1940s, the group was centered in Zürich, a wartime refuge for critical intellectuals. Its influence, though, was felt throughout Europe (notably in the op art of Bridget Riley and Victor Vasarely), in the United States (in color-field painting and minimalism), and in Latin America (especially among Brazilian concrete and neoconcrete artists, such as Lygia Clark, Hélio Oiticica, and Cildo Meireles). The movement was varied, but it found an early unity in the search for an art that would be the visual and tactile expression of pure logic (“the mathematical way of thinking in the art of our times,” as Bill put it).19 As the concretization of the intellect and the removal of interpretation, it was a direct riposte to Surrealism’s appeal to the unconscious. Yet subjectivity proved to be a stubborn presence. Concrete paintings and sculptures were also the product of the artists’ arbitrary choices. Probability, chance, and randomness promised a solution, and the search for effective ways to integrate them into the artistic process became an important preoccupation.
It took me a long time to understand the importance of these aesthetics for Cornelia. On the one hand, it seemed clear that her sensuous attention to the insect contravened their most basic premise: the adherence to Malevich’s “nonobjectivist” determination to shatter the connection between art and material objects. Yet I knew from our conversations that in the moment of painting, Cornelia sees form and color, not the independent object. Nor is there anything accidental in the formality of her portraits or the repetition of the poses. All is geometric, the insects located on a grid that she systematically completes. Her method is both highly precise and, in the sense that the outcome is contingent on what is present under the microscope, substantially random. It is not unusual that after finishing a painting, she discovers that the insect is deformed in ways she hadn’t noticed before. Her painting practice, she insists, creates a rigorous break, removing her environmentalist politics and her sympathies for the animal from the image, so that the paintings themselves are freed of her pres
ence. “My task,” she told me, echoing Max Bill, “is just to show [the insect] and to paint it, not to judge it.” Viewers, she says, must search for meaning in the picture unburdened by her message.
But, I wondered, with the strength of her commitment to anti-nuclear politics and to the insects themselves and with the descriptive labels accompanying the images and all the controversy that has surrounded her work, how could either she or the viewer avoid judgment? “I do think it’s possible,” she replied. “When I sit there and draw, I want nothing else than to be as precise as possible. It is not simply politics: I have a deep interest in structure in nature.” But what kind of non-object art can be based so strongly in objects? Can her pictures be both “deeply in the world,” as she puts it, and speak of nothing beyond themselves? Isn’t there a contradiction between these twin impulses of her painting: to recognize the individual insect and simultaneously to efface it into an aesthetic logic of form? Yes, she says without hesitation, her work is really neither concrete nor naturalistic. And according to many, it is also neither science nor art. Perhaps, she laughs, that’s why she so rarely manages to sell any of it!
Much later that evening, with both of us fading fast and our conversation faltering, she returns again to this question. We are talking about her involvement in campaigning, how an exhibition of her paintings organized by the World Wildlife Fund toured sites slated for nuclear-waste disposal, when she abruptly shifts the topic. “It’s the artistic question,” she says suddenly. “How to show structure … It’s a question of how can I show the structure of what I find.” It is not simply politics. But how to assert this when the politics overshadows everything and the painting is far more complex than it appears?