Insectopedia (6 page)

But it is not as if acceptance in the art world has been any easier. In a sympathetic essay, the painter and critic Peter Suchin writes that “for one audience Hesse-Honegger’s practice is invalidated by its ‘artistic’ manner, for another it is simply not artistic enough.” In this arena, her work is too assertively realist and too tied to illustration, which, Suchin continues, “many would claim … is not ‘art’ but mere technique, a formulaic manner of record-making, largely devoid of the innovative, critical, and transformative qualities frequently associated with artistic production.”
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Cornelia’s unwillingness to respect epistemological boundaries seems to make art critics as uncomfortable as it does scientists. Her paintings insist that it is the boundary itself, rather than its breaching, that is the problem, that science and the visual arts belong together, that their separation is, as Galileo’s vibrant lunar washes make clear, an artifact of the historical slicing of knowledge into ever more specialized and ever less ambitious disciplines. She claims scientific ancestors in Gesner, Merian, and Galileo, all of whom understood that active seeing through painting
and drawing is the basis of scientific inquiry, that the empirical method begins with the artist’s development of a mode of attention grounded in the close observation of nature.

But vision, perception, and attention are just a part of the story. After the publication of her second
Tages-Anzeiger
article, Cornelia traveled to Sellafield. Because contamination from the reactor there was known to be severe, she expected to find a larger number of damaged insects and deformities more serious than those she found near Aargau. But the difference between the sites was insignificant. Soon after, when she visited Chernobyl, she was appalled by the bleak conditions in which the local population lived, and she was surprised—and awkwardly disappointed—to discover that even there insect life was no more disturbed than in Switzerland. A period of introspection followed, a moment, it seems, of a more profound breaking with the science in which she had been trained at the Institute of Zoology:

The solution lay in a return to the principles of concrete art, to its affinity for science as a shared site of rationality, and in particular to its understanding of randomness. Random thinking was something Cornelia had already integrated into her painting practice and her aesthetics. It was a key component of her struggle to allow the insect to be itself rather than merely a vehicle for her artistic expression. Staring gloomily down the lens of her microscope in those rooms in northwest England, she sees the evidence of her observation again and again contradicting the preconceptions she is imposing on the irradiated landscape. She sees contingency at every turn: “Reality is different. Each nuclear power plant emits its own nuclear cocktail. Every landscape with its own characteristic meteorological and topographical conditions reacts differently.
In Switzerland, where weather conditions with inversions prevents, or at least mitigates, the dispersal of waste material and radioactivity in the atmosphere, the situation is entirely different from an area where a strong wind is constantly sweeping over the countryside.”
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Such symmetry! And what grim satisfaction when it all comes together: the contingency of landscapes and bodies, the concrete aesthetics of chance, and the random behavior of artificial radionuclides. Something like randomness, a combination of contingency and chance, is now an analytic as well as an aesthetic:

With her growing alienation from mainstream science and her increasing proximity to anti-nuclear activism come not only a willingness to critique nuclear science as a corrupt enterprise but also a renewed sense of science’s epistemological limitations. Some of this comes from her sensitivity to the vulnerability of the nonhuman universe of bugs, flies, and leaves. Some comes from personal disenchantment. And some seems to derive from lectures she attended two decades ago by the Austrian physicist and philosopher Paul Feyerabend, famous for arguing against proscriptive method and for the equivalence of multiple ways of knowing.
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I think I hear echoes of Feyerabend’s iconoclastic “epistemological anarchism” when she tells me how scientists conceive too much in linearities, and I think I hear them again when she tells me how they visualize in discrete, unconnected objects, quarantining the issues they study and relieving themselves of the problem of politics, as if both systematic and random connections did not exist, as if the problem of the atom were not deeply tied to the problems of clean
water, clean air, dying forests, and poisoned food, as if this were not a problem of ways of living as much as ways of knowing.

I found an upstairs window seat on the double-decker train. Zürich gleamed in the morning sunshine, all strong colors, deep shadows, and crisp air. The lake glistened. The clouds cleared. I saw the mountains for the first time. The train rattled out to the airport.

One of the last things Cornelia told me was “I think I cannot show myself as a whole.” She brought out a work I hadn’t seen before and set it down in front of us, a large picture of brightly colored paper cuts, silhouettes of outsize insect body parts arranged in series on a white background. The insects stripped bare. One type of essence. Color, form, quantity.

It was the other pictures, the portraits, that she described as “brutal paintings.” But as the city flattened into suburbs and objects beyond the window blurred into indistinctness, I began to think that these more concrete images were the truly violent ones. After all, it is in these paintings, the paintings that show less of the insect and more of herself, that Cornelia renounces her intimacy with the individual leaf bugs and finds a way to discard all her attachments.

But the portraits—the brutal portraits—dissatisfy her. By too effectively standing in for human fears and too readily bringing viewers’ self-concern to the fore, they elicit the wrong response. People see only the iconic figure of the insect, she said, never the individual insect itself. They see a biological indicator pathetic in its beauty, a warning sign, a prophecy of a day already dawned. They see neither the individual insect nor her painting, the non-object painting that refers to nothing except itself.

Yet somehow the portraits also achieve a doubling, a breaching of the lines between human and animal. These intensely direct paintings embedded so strongly in fears of invisible poison and malevolent corporate power enforce identification across the most radical of gaps by insisting on the most fundamental of commonalities—physical vulnerability, mortality—and by evoking a sense of humility in the face of complex
beauty. Her portraits and the controversy she generates around them force people to transcend species difference by recognizing a conjoined fate, a common witnessing, a shared victimhood. It is quite unsettling: the eye of the painter and the viewer suspended between the clinical and the empathetic, a loss of stable distinction between subjects and objects, between humans and insects, between intimacy and distance.

Cornelia makes meticulous spiral-bound books of her field trips, just a few copies of each. Over the years they have become more elaborate and now include her photographs of the sites she visits, as well as color photocopies of her paintings, maps, statistical appendices, and lists of the collected insects, with records of any deformities. All these are inserted around her journal, a day-by-day account of the trip that includes descriptions of her encounters with people, plants, and insects. The books are beautiful objects, and the journal is relaxed and personal, full of anecdotes, reflections, and asides. She recalls how in Moscow, Idaho, two teenage girls in town for a football game entered her room, examined her microscope and collecting equipment, one of them asking if she were a witch, taking her hands, and sensing an intense vibration, a vibration that Cornelia sensed also. “She asked me what she had to do to become a person like me. I told her that she has to always listen to her heart and never worship a human being. If she wanted to find solace, she had to turn to an animal or a tree for help.”

Nearby, in Connell, Washington, close to the Hanford reactor, she became friendly with the woman who cleaned her hotel room. The woman and members of her family—including her pets—have become sick with illnesses that the woman attributed to unacknowledged radioactive releases from the plant. But “her husband, neighbors, and even her 22-year-old son say she is nuts. She was happy to find in me a person who listened for once and agreed. I will never forget Donna. For me she represents all the people suffering not only from radioactivity but also from [the] brutality of the experts who claim that health problems are purely a form of imagination or bad nourishment. What these people sense is denied, so how can they trust their own senses when the experts tell them they are crazy?”
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In Omonville-la-Petite, in Normandy, she tries to dissuade a man who has been recruited to work in the COGEMA nuclear plant at Cap de la Hague:

The journals catalog her collecting. She finds seventeen ambush bugs on the borders of Zion National Park, in Utah. “When I narcotized them, they let out a sweet smell, which hurt my eyes and made me nearly faint. They really tried to defend themselves, but alas I was stronger.”
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Weeks later, on arriving in Connell, she writes: “I was tired of looking for and killing insects.”

Here she is at the entrance to the Hanford reactor. She includes this photograph at the end of her journal. Mindful of the hostility she faces, she calls it “a document, necessary to make people trust that I was really there.”

She looks happy in the picture, the “scientific artist” laughing with the guard who helped her select the best angle for the shot. She is doing something important, deeply in the world, living with the disappointments, managing the contradictions, feeling part of everything, feeling very connected, showing herself as a whole, very much alive.

One summer many years ago, I found work in a restaurant kitchen outside London. Arriving early one morning during my first week, I was led by the manager to a white door on the far side of a small, open courtyard. He removed the padlock, and we stood there as our eyes slowly adjusted to the gloomy interior. A small storeroom gradually came into view, with piles of supplies: cases of oils and canned vegetables, sacks filled with flour.

The floor was a mottled white, and it was only after a few moments that I realized, with some horror, why we were standing on the threshold as if at the seashore, silent under a lowering sky. No one else will do it, the manager told me. You’ll need a broom and those bottles of bleach.