art and atoms The Art of the Periodic Table T A m i i . S P e ct o R Captivated by the periodic table’s cultural power as one of the scientific is not an inert entity but a generative schematic [5]. Most icons, numerous contemporary visual artists transmute the table into artists ignore the inner structure of the table’s atoms, prefer- a contemplation of its symbols and substance. This article employs a ring to exploit its prequantum mechanical form as terrain cross-disciplinary model of art criticism that focuses on the specific ways ABSTRACT artists illuminate the periodic table’s cataloging innovation, memorable from which to delve into its cataloging innovation, visual visuality, formal qualities and semiotic resonances. resonances, formal qualities and semiotic reverberations. They have thereby exposed the table’s constitutive unique- ness: The periodic table is not “reducible to linguistic [or When Henry Hubbard’s “Periodic Chart of the Atoms” was mathematical] expression,” but instead serves as an organiza- first hung in myriad chemistry classrooms in the 1920s, none tional structure “for collecting the known” and as a “practical could have predicted how it would imprint its form, if not guide for directing work towards the unknown” [6]. In art- its scientific content, onto the minds of schoolchildren; none ists’ hands the table looks backward at school and childhood, would have surmised the popular interest it would sustain, sideways at science, and forward into art. nor the power with which it would carry its imprint from the classroom into adulthood [1]. The periodic table has become ReAdymAde an object of nostalgia that has been commodified, includ- The common denominator that runs through periodic table ing as a multitude of posters that substitute the chemical art is that it appropriates a popular object that combines fa- elements with common objects (the Periodic Table of Veg- miliarity with nostalgia: an object that is imprinted on our etables) and systems (the Periodic Table of World Religions). minds in youth and over time accrues layers of meaning. Such uses of the table rely on the naive exploitation of its Periodic table art is therefore “readymade,” in the vein of emblematic power and the acronymic link between words Jasper Johns [7]. Repurposed iconic objects, whether a flag and the elemental symbols [2], while more recent incarna- or the periodic table, resonate aesthetically because of their tions spring from the inspiration its subject material provides contextual novelty and referential simultaneity (object/not visual artists, a survey of whose work is my focus. object). Appropriated rather than, like Duchamp’s urinal, Among scientific icons appropriated by artists, the peri- stripped from mundane context, the periodic table serves odic table is second only to the double helix [3], although the purpose of Johns’s alphabets and numerals, becoming a unlike DNA there has been little critical discussion of its magnet “for memories and associations” [8]. It lies, in Johns’s artistic manifestations. Artists have been captivated by the words, among the “things the mind already knows” [9], table’s cultural power, and through aesthetic invention and concurrently scientific tool, pedagogical artifact and icon; intervention they have transmuted the popular status of this artistic object, schema and metaphor. Robert Morris writes object into a contemplation of its symbols and substance. of Johns’s White Numbers (1958), a canvas filled to the edge While philosophers of science have debated whether the with a grid of stenciled yellowish-white-grey digits (0–9), periodic table (and chemistry itself) is reducible to physics, “as a self-enclosed and self-completing mechanism, or as an artists have expanded our appreciation of the table’s scien- algorithm or rule for sequences, which nullifies the freedom tific primacy [4]. For chemists and artists the periodic table for certain aesthetic decisions” [10]. Morris believes that such sequences imprison art within the limits of the readymade, Tami I. Spector (chemist, educator), Department of Chemistry, University of San Francisco, 2130 Fulton Street, San Francisco, CA 94117-1080, U.S.A. producing pathos; any survey of such readymades, however, Email: [email protected]. reveals that formal constraint makes available a new kind See www.mitpressjournals.org/toc/leon/52/3 for supplemental files associated of freedom—multifarious explorations diversify the mean- with this issue. ings of the thing, create a world within a grain of sand [11], 292 LEONARDO, Vol. 52, No. 3, pp. 292–299, 2019 doi:10.1162/LEON_a_01444 ©2019 ISAST Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/leon_a_01444 by guest on 25 September 2021 art and atoms Fig. 1. Erich Füllgrabe, elemental board, collage, acrylic paint, India ink on paper, mounted on wooden plates, 160 × 240 cm, 1997. (© Erich Füllgrabe) as demonstrated by Johns’s multiple renderings of targets, blocks of the material world; for Johns, “any relationship of flags, alphabets and numbers, and, analogously, by the vari- lexical sense to the work in question is arbitrary or coinciden- ous ways artists exploit the table. tal,” while for Bradshaw and other contemporary artists, the Among the artists who work with the periodic table, periodic table’s cultural associations, linguistic connotations Blair Bradshaw paints works that most overtly reference and form are the focus [17]. aesthetic readymades. For example, like Johns’s Alphabets (1956), Bradshaw’s Periodic Table (Color Plate B) grids the FoRm entire canvas and fills virtually every grid box with stenciled Eric Scerri notes that for chemists “there is no one ‘best’ pe- atomic symbols overlaid on a ghostly background [12]. De- riodic table and that one’s choice depends on what particular spite their formal similarities, the distinct subject materials aspect of periodicity of the elements one is most interested in of these two artists highlight the precise cultural currency depicting” [18]. Formal analyses of artists’ renderings of the the table holds for artists. Johns used numbers and letters be- periodic table, however, indicate that they adhere predomi- cause they provide manifolds that he didn’t have to “design,” nately to the medium-long form of the table, also the most ostensibly to give him “room to work on other levels” [13]. commonly used scientific form. The medium-long form fore- As Johns narrates his motivations, his choice of subject was shortens the table by placing the f-block elements 57–70 and secondary to other concerns, including materiality, formal- 89–102 in separate rows below the rest of the table rather than ity and objectivity [14]. He was, he recounts, “interested in inserting them according to their atomic numbers, yielding the . play between thinking, seeing, saying and nothing” a table with 18 columns. Scientists validate this foreshorten- [15]. Obversely, Bradshaw’s iconic subject material lies among ing of the table based on electron configuration, but the ac- his primary concerns. He is “inspired by the organizing lan- tual explanation is likely pedagogical: The long form is more guages created by scientists” and transfixed by the “ability “cumbersome” and adapts less well to wall charts [19]. Thus, of the periodic table to represent such complicated ideas in as we shift our attention from the formal constraints of the such simple form” [16]. While Johns sought to obliterate the readymade to the form of the table itself, we find artistic or- semiotic associations of his sequential alphabets and num- thodoxy conferred on the medium-long form. bers, often submerging them in grey and white paint almost Erich Füllgrabe’s Elemental Board (Fig. 1) and Keith Wil- to the point of illegibility, Bradshaw elevates the iconography son’s Periodic Table (Fig. 2) exemplify this orthodoxy in two of the periodic table, using its form to create visual-linguistic renditions of the table that at first glance appear disparate: connections and rearranging and isolating the elements into Füllgrabe renders each element of his periodic table as an clever wordplay. He foregrounds the elements through de- abstract painting in his examination of the means by which viation, using recursion to reproduce the semantic building both chemists and artists “translate their individual experi- Spector, The Art of the Periodic Table 293 Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/leon_a_01444 by guest on 25 September 2021 art and atoms Fig. 2. Keith Wilson, Periodic Table, 109 galvanized steel cubes and various objects, 4 × 9 × 9 m, 2004. (© Keith Wilson) ences and experiments into visual presentations of results a hortus botanicus of forms, a legerdemain that reaches into that considerably differ from their starting points” [20]; the very roots from which the periodic table springs. In her Wilson’s massive three-dimensional grid of galvanized steel words, she transforms “chemistry’s Periodic Table, a chart boxes “set[s] up connections between an extensive range of of letters and numbers, into a garden of sculptural elements collected objects, from redundant machinery to logs and based on geometry and atomic number” with a metaphys- empty beer cases” [21]. Yet despite the material and symbolic ics that fittingly places atoms at the center and origin of the dissimilarities of these two renditions, their forms reiterate universe [27]. the medium-long form table. Although artists occasionally veer from the table’s iconic Collecting And Cataloging form [22], to my knowledge, only Rebecca Kamen’s installa- Tales of how Dmitri Mendeleev schematized the elements tion art piece Divining Nature: An Elemental Garden (Fig. 3) vary in their details, but at their core they are stories of col- wholly eschews its ready visuality [23]. lecting and cataloging [28]. In sum, Mendeleev collected to- Initially animated by the cosmology of Buddhist mandalas gether the physical properties of the 63 known elements and and stupas, seventeenth-century alchemical texts [24] and cataloged them by their atomic weights.