Art and Atoms: A Chemical Paradox

chemistry is a conflicted science. Rooted in the mysteries of the invisible matter that makes up our tangible world, yet ethically compromised by its potential for manufacturing injurious agents; creating compounds that save lives, and others that destroy the environment—at least since the Industrial Revolution chemistry has juggled its dual identity. By the late 19th century, as chemists began to understand the structures of atoms and molecules, London had been for decades enveloped by its famous fogs—lethal, hydrocarbon-based vapors, precursive of the Great Smog of 1952 that killed 12,000 people; in the 1940s advertisements for the insecticide dichlorodiphenyltrichloroethane proclaimed “DDT is good for me-e-e” [1]; and in our time, silicon and durable plastics have brought us pocket computers while rare-earth metal dump-sites litter the developing world.

In the 1980s, when I was a burgeoning chemist, Agent Orange, DDT, and the Bhopal disaster had marred the industrial pastoral vision of a world purified of pests and weeds. I found myself defensive of my professional choice, arguing that not all chemists were complicit in the depravities of Monsanto and Union Carbide. Yet, even as I swam in the heady intellectual ether of theoretical constructs that underlay my science, I broke out in rashes so severe from chemicals I worked with in the lab that I had to wear saline-soaked gloves while I slept. I felt caught between the verity that “everything is chemistry” and the duplicity of Dupont’s “Better Things for Better Living Through Chemistry” promotional campaign [2].

Chemists have a difficult time articulating this conflict because it is personal—even writing this editorial fills me with a sense that I am betraying my profession; yet, the paradoxes yielded by chemistry’s quandaries feed the artistic imagination. Art, unlike science, allows for the expression of simultaneous, fraught perspectives. J.M.W. Turner’s vaporous skies; Bernd and Hilla Becher’s austere industrial photographic typographies of defunct oil refineries, blast furnaces and cooling towers; or Shirley Tse’s synthetic polymers, in forms such as bubble-wrap and plastic garbage bags, embedded in the “natural” environment—each, like the work of many other artists, expresses the tension produced by competing perspectives.

Turner’s skies were recently scientifically analyzed, in part, “to provide additional evidence of multidecadal increase in the atmospheric optical depths during the industrial ‘revolution’ ” (i.e. as a way to measure air pollution during that time) [3]. I find this scientific and historical use of Turner’s paintings a curiosity, one that hardly conveys the inherent sublimity in works like Rain, Steam and Speed or Keelmen Heaving Coals by Moonlight—works that still pulse with artistic innovation, while projecting the overwhelming vastness of industrialization. Tse’s and the Bechers’ art would seem to articulate a more overt polemic than Turner’s sublime atmospheric effects, but, as Tse has remarked, rather than a reductive commentary on the environmental impact of plastic, she uses her materials rhetorically, as metaphors for human mobility and plasticity in the 21st century [4].

Chemists, like other scientists, sometimes view the intersections of art and science pragmatically, e.g. art as a tool for illustrating scientific concepts, enhancing scientific images or for graphically representing data. Art can do this, and often does. More importantly, though, art provides chemists an access into the interstitial depths inherent in studying the invisible molecular components that yield the cultural and personal ambiguities of our chosen profession.