Insectopedia Part 1

Insectopedia.

by Hugh Raffles.

In the Beginning ...

In the beginning, a long, long time ago, a time before any people were here, a time close to the primordial gas and ooze, a time not too long after the time (we are, after all, talking geological time) when those heroic protozoa created the planet's first encyclopedia by turning themselves into mitochondria and chloroplasts within other cells, which in turn formed alliances that grew into yet other beings, which joined up with yet others to make invisible cities, worlds within worlds ... Sometime after that time but still long before our time, there were the insects.

For as long as we've been here, they've been here too. Wherever we've traveled, they've been there too. And still, we don't know them very well, not even the ones we're closest to, the ones that eat our food and share our beds. Who are they, these beings so different from us and from each other? What do they do? What worlds do they make? What do we make of them? How do we live with them? How could we live with them differently?

Imagine an insect. What comes to mind? A housefly? A dragonfly? A b.u.mblebee? A parasitic wasp? A gnat? A mosquito? A bombardier beetle? A rhinoceros beetle? A morpho b.u.t.terfly? A death's-head moth? A praying mantis? A stick insect? A caterpillar? Such varied beings, so different from each other and from us. So prosaic and so exotic, so tiny and so huge, so social and so solitary, so expressive and so inscrutable, so generative and so opaque, so seductive yet so unsettling. Pollinators, pests, disease vectors, decomposers, laboratory animals, prime objects of scientific attention, experimentation, and intervention. The stuff of dreams and nightmares. The stuff of economy and culture. Not just deeply present in the world but deeply there, creating it, too.

There are too many insects, uncountable numbers, more all the time. And they are so busy, so indifferent, and so powerful. They'll almost never do what we tell them to do. They'll rarely be what we want them to be. They won't keep still. In every respect, they are really very complicated creatures.

On August 10, 1926, a Stinson Detroiter SM-1 six-seater monoplane took off from the rudimentary airstrip at Tallulah, Louisiana. The Detroiter was the first airplane built with an electric starter motor, wheel brakes, and a heated cabin, but it was not a good climber, so the pilot leveled off quickly, circled the airstrip and surrounding landscape, held open the specially fitted sticky trap beneath the plane's wing for the designated ten minutes, and soon returned to land. As he touched down, P. A. Glick and his colleagues at the Division of Cotton Insect Investigations of the U.S. Bureau of Entomology and Plant Quarantine ran out to meet him.

It was a historic flight: the first attempt to collect insects by airplane. Glick and his a.s.sociates, as well as researchers at the Department of Agriculture and at regional organizations such as the New York State Museum, were trying to discover the migration secrets of gypsy moths, cotton bollworm moths, and other insects that were munching their way through the nation's natural resources. They wanted to predict infestations, to know what might happen next. How could they contain these insect enemies if they didn't know where, when, and how they traveled?

Before Tallulah, high-alt.i.tude entomology had barely got off the ground. Researchers sent up balloons and kites fitted with hanging nets, climbed up pylons, and pestered lighthouse keepers and mountaineers. But armed now with the new airplane technology, Glick went down to Tlahualilo in Durango, Mexico. There, 3,000 feet above the valley plain, his pilots trapped the pink bollworm moth, a feared invader of the U.S. cotton crop. Face-to-face with the unantic.i.p.ated scale of his task, Glick wrote tersely that "the pink bollworm moths are carried in the upper air currents for considerable distances."1 There were only a few flies and wasps in that first trap at Tallulah. But over the next five years, the researchers flew more than 1,300 sorties from the Louisiana airstrip and captured tens of thousands more insects at alt.i.tudes ranging from 20 to 15,000 feet. They generated a long series of charts and tables, cataloguing individual insects of 700 named species according to the height at which they were collected, time of day, wind speed and direction, temperature, barometric pressure, humidity, dew point, and many other physical variables. They already knew something about long-distance dispersal. They had heard about the b.u.t.terflies, gnats, water striders, leaf bugs, booklice, and katydids sighted hundreds of miles out on the open ocean; about the aphids that Captain William Parry had encountered on ice floes during his polar expedition of 1828; and about those other aphids that, in 1925, made the 800-mile journey across the frigid, windswept Barents Sea between the Kola Peninsula, in Russia, and Spitsbergen, off Norway, in just twenty-four hours. Still, they were taken aback by the enormous quant.i.ties of animals they were discovering in the air above Louisiana and unashamedly astonished by the heights at which they found them.2 All of a sudden, it seemed, the heavens had opened. All of a sudden, it seemed, the heavens had opened.

Unmoored, they turned to the ocean, began talking about the "aeroplankton" drifting in the vastness of the open skies. They told each other about tiny insects, some of them wingless, all with large surface-area-to-weight ratios, plucked from their earthly tethers by a sharp gust of wind, picked up on air currents and thrust high into the convection streams without volition or capacity for resistance, some terrible accident, carried great distances across oceans and continents, then dropped with the same fateful arbitrariness in a downdraft on some distant mountaintop or valley plain. They estimated that at any given time on any given day throughout the year, the air column rising from 50 to 14,000 feet above one square mile of Louisiana countryside contained an average of 25 million insects and perhaps as many as 36 million.3 They found ladybugs at 6,000 feet during the daytime, striped cuc.u.mber beetles at 3,000 feet during the night. They collected three scorpion flies at 5,000 feet, thirty-one fruit flies between 200 and 3,000, a fungus gnat at 7,000 and another at 10,000. They trapped an anthrax-transmitting horsefly at 200 feet and another at 1,000. They caught wingless worker ants as high as 4,000 feet and sixteen species of parasitic ichneumon wasps at alt.i.tudes up to 5,000 feet. At 15,000 feet, "probably the highest elevation at which any specimen has ever been taken above the surface of the earth," they trapped a ballooning spider, a feat that reminded Glick of spiders thought to have circ.u.mnavigated the globe on the trade winds and led him to write that "the young of most spiders are more or less addicted to this mode of transportation," an image of excited little animals packing their luggage that opened a small rupture in the consensus around the pa.s.sivity of all this airborne movement and led to Glick's subsequent observation that ballooning spiders not only climb up to an exposed site (a twig or a flower, for instance), stand on tiptoe, raise their abdomen, test the atmosphere, throw out silk filaments, and launch themselves into the blue, all free legs spread-eagled, but that they also use their bodies and their silk to control their descent and the location of their landing. They found ladybugs at 6,000 feet during the daytime, striped cuc.u.mber beetles at 3,000 feet during the night. They collected three scorpion flies at 5,000 feet, thirty-one fruit flies between 200 and 3,000, a fungus gnat at 7,000 and another at 10,000. They trapped an anthrax-transmitting horsefly at 200 feet and another at 1,000. They caught wingless worker ants as high as 4,000 feet and sixteen species of parasitic ichneumon wasps at alt.i.tudes up to 5,000 feet. At 15,000 feet, "probably the highest elevation at which any specimen has ever been taken above the surface of the earth," they trapped a ballooning spider, a feat that reminded Glick of spiders thought to have circ.u.mnavigated the globe on the trade winds and led him to write that "the young of most spiders are more or less addicted to this mode of transportation," an image of excited little animals packing their luggage that opened a small rupture in the consensus around the pa.s.sivity of all this airborne movement and led to Glick's subsequent observation that ballooning spiders not only climb up to an exposed site (a twig or a flower, for instance), stand on tiptoe, raise their abdomen, test the atmosphere, throw out silk filaments, and launch themselves into the blue, all free legs spread-eagled, but that they also use their bodies and their silk to control their descent and the location of their landing.4 Thirty-six million little animals flying unseen above one square mile of countryside? The heavens opened. The air column was "a vault of insect-laden air" from which fell "a continuous rain." Thirty-six million little animals flying unseen above one square mile of countryside? The heavens opened. The air column was "a vault of insect-laden air" from which fell "a continuous rain."5

From the mid-1920s through the 1930s, high-alt.i.tude researchers in France, England, and the United States were making the same discoveries and coming to the same conclusions. Broadly speaking, they decided, there were two kinds of insect travel.6 The tiny insects of the aerial plankton occupied the air above 3,000 feet, where they moved involuntarily, unable to resist the fast-moving higher-level currents. Stronger-flying, larger insects kept relatively close to the ground, below the 3,000-feet boundary, harnessing the calmer, low-alt.i.tude winds and migrating according to their own routes and schedules. These lower-level migrations could be spectacular. Some, such as those of the monarch b.u.t.terflies and the Old Testament locusts, were already familiar. Others could take an entomologist by surprise. All were somehow mysterious. In 1900, James William Tutt witnessed millions of noctuid Silver Y moths flying with other insects in a steady east-west line alongside migrating birds. A few years later, William Beebe from the New York Zoological Society-the same William Beebe who pioneered deep-sea exploration in his steel bathysphere-found himself caught in a dense ma.s.s of purplish-brown b.u.t.terflies on the Portachuelo Pa.s.s in northern Venezuela. Despite his confusion, Beebe managed to calculate that at least 186,000 insects had swept by him in the first ninety minutes. An hour later, with the torrent now "going full strength," he composed himself enough to pull out his high-power binoculars: The tiny insects of the aerial plankton occupied the air above 3,000 feet, where they moved involuntarily, unable to resist the fast-moving higher-level currents. Stronger-flying, larger insects kept relatively close to the ground, below the 3,000-feet boundary, harnessing the calmer, low-alt.i.tude winds and migrating according to their own routes and schedules. These lower-level migrations could be spectacular. Some, such as those of the monarch b.u.t.terflies and the Old Testament locusts, were already familiar. Others could take an entomologist by surprise. All were somehow mysterious. In 1900, James William Tutt witnessed millions of noctuid Silver Y moths flying with other insects in a steady east-west line alongside migrating birds. A few years later, William Beebe from the New York Zoological Society-the same William Beebe who pioneered deep-sea exploration in his steel bathysphere-found himself caught in a dense ma.s.s of purplish-brown b.u.t.terflies on the Portachuelo Pa.s.s in northern Venezuela. Despite his confusion, Beebe managed to calculate that at least 186,000 insects had swept by him in the first ninety minutes. An hour later, with the torrent now "going full strength," he composed himself enough to pull out his high-power binoculars: I began about twenty-five feet overhead and then refocussed slowly upward until the limit of vision of the small insects was reached. This, judged by horizontal tests of objects of similar size would be about a half mile zenithwards, and at every fractional turn of the screw, more and more smaller-appearing b.u.t.terflies fluttered into clarity.Throughout the entire extent of verticality there was no lessening of denseness of flying insects.... For many days this particular phase of migration continued, millions upon millions coming from some unknown source, travelling due south to an equally mysterious destination.

Beebe also reported a different phenomenon: a steady stream of insects of many species-c.o.c.kchafers, chrysomelid beetles, vespid wasps, bees, moths, b.u.t.terflies, and "hosts upon hosts of minute winged insect life"-pa.s.sing together through the migration flyway in a ma.s.sive motley emigration that apparently took place every year.7 All that minute insect life was too small to be counted. But aphids, an indistinct haze, will swarm at densities up to 250 times greater than that of b.u.t.terflies. In fact, these tiny ones-the aphids, the thrips, the microlepidoptera, the smallest beetles, the smallest parasitic wasps, all barely visible to the human eye-form the overwhelming majority of species and individuals of the cla.s.s Insecta, testimony to the fact that evolution shrank the insects over the millennia even as it exploded their numbers and differences. All that minute insect life was too small to be counted. But aphids, an indistinct haze, will swarm at densities up to 250 times greater than that of b.u.t.terflies. In fact, these tiny ones-the aphids, the thrips, the microlepidoptera, the smallest beetles, the smallest parasitic wasps, all barely visible to the human eye-form the overwhelming majority of species and individuals of the cla.s.s Insecta, testimony to the fact that evolution shrank the insects over the millennia even as it exploded their numbers and differences.

The giant dragonflies of the late Paleozoic, with their thirty-inch wingspans, are no more. As insects miniaturized, they developed their near-endless variety of aerodynamic body shapes and their specialized muscles for super-high-frequency wingbeats. Of the million or so species currently described, the average adult body length is at most a mere two tenths of an inch, and the median length is significantly less. Nonetheless, it is the larger, more visible insects, those four tenths of an inch or more in length (that is, at least twenty times larger than the average), that command the attention of researchers. If we subtract the huge volume of genomic studies of the fruit fly Drosophila melanogaster Drosophila melanogaster, the literature on tiny insects is scant.8 It seems clear that the relative abundance of miniature insects that Glick recorded in the air column is less a result of their being so easily carried aloft than a result of the fact that they so outnumber their larger relatives. It seems clear that the relative abundance of miniature insects that Glick recorded in the air column is less a result of their being so easily carried aloft than a result of the fact that they so outnumber their larger relatives.

Glick himself reported strong-flying dragonflies at 7,000 feet over Tallulah, large insects flying well above the 3,000-foot boundary and flying so comfortably that they s.h.i.+fted direction to avoid his plane. Other researchers, including Beebe, recorded minute weak-flying insects-the supposedly involuntary dispersers-close to the ground, well below the proposed threshold. Researchers of insect flight now talk about the boundary layer in more fluid terms, as a variable region near the earth's surface in which wind speed is less than the speed at which a particular insect is capable of flying, a zone that varies with the strength of the wind and the capacity of the insect. Within the boundary layer, the insect is able to orient itself actively. Above the boundary layer, its direction of flight is strongly influenced by the prevailing winds, and the animal adapts to, rather than overcomes, atmospheric conditions.9 Given that only about 40 percent of known insects fly at airspeeds greater than three feet per second and that such timid winds-so gentle that a human can barely sense them-are generally found only close to the ground, most insects exercise full control over their directionality only at an alt.i.tude of three to six feet. Given that only about 40 percent of known insects fly at airspeeds greater than three feet per second and that such timid winds-so gentle that a human can barely sense them-are generally found only close to the ground, most insects exercise full control over their directionality only at an alt.i.tude of three to six feet.10 Yet beyond the boundary layer, thousands of feet into the troposphere, it's likely that only a small proportion of these animals-those without wings (such as spiders and mites), those that become too cold, and those suffering from exhaustion-are pa.s.sively carried. From the tiniest to the largest, migrating insects are out there actively flying, flapping their wings, maintaining or varying their alt.i.tude and direction despite the strength of the winds around them. Sometimes they hover, sometimes they glide, sometimes they free-fall, sometimes they soar. They do what they can to evade birds in the daytime and bats at night. Rarely do they drift along like pollen in a breeze. Or plankton in the ocean.

No, aerial plankton is not a good name for these animals. They don't live in this medium; they occupy it temporarily. And their residency is full of calculation and action. Their exodus is triggered by the impulse to find new habitats and to encounter new hosts. Sometimes their flights are short, repeated dispersals; sometimes they are vast migrations from which the traveler may or may not return. In either case, there is little pa.s.sivity. Takeoff is oriented to wind and light. If the animal is strong enough, flight is often against or across the wind. b.u.t.terflies and locusts streaming in formation may suddenly interrupt a low-level journey with a dramatic collective rise to catch a current at thousands of feet. Even tiny insects appear to seek out thermal drafts. In the upper reaches of the air column, the minute ones take paths strongly determined by the wind, but inside the airstream they hold steady, beating their wings, adjusting their direction and alt.i.tude. And then they alight, often prompted by scent or reflecting light, using their bodies to bring themselves to earth.

Forty years ago, Cecil Johnson, the author of a cla.s.sic text on insect migration and dispersal, pointed out that many, perhaps most, individual insects die on these voyages, but "this is the price such species pay for finding their habitats." Johnson conjured an image of a planet under surveillance, "the surface of the Earth is thus scanned very effectively as millions of individuals, flying on air currents, continuously encounter suitable and unsuitable situations." When the situation does not suit, they soon take off again in search of a better location for feeding or breeding (or some other activity obscure to us), following "a direction determined either by the wind or themselves."11 It is a fact of planetary life, a great "diffusion system" that transports immense populations of animals "day after day, year after year, century after century." It is a fact of planetary life, a great "diffusion system" that transports immense populations of animals "day after day, year after year, century after century."12 What happens to the notion of an invasive species in the face of this continuous and irrepressible traffic of short- and long-range travel, dispersal, and migration? What is left of a notion that everything has its own place, that everything belongs somewhere and nowhere else, that boundaries are inviolable, that with vigilance and chemicals this hyperabundance of willful and random life can be brought under control? Perhaps this was what Glick glimpsed 3,000 feet above Durango, face-to-face with the pink bollworm moth, its flapping wings gleaming in the high-alt.i.tude suns.h.i.+ne. What happens to the notion of an invasive species in the face of this continuous and irrepressible traffic of short- and long-range travel, dispersal, and migration? What is left of a notion that everything has its own place, that everything belongs somewhere and nowhere else, that boundaries are inviolable, that with vigilance and chemicals this hyperabundance of willful and random life can be brought under control? Perhaps this was what Glick glimpsed 3,000 feet above Durango, face-to-face with the pink bollworm moth, its flapping wings gleaming in the high-alt.i.tude suns.h.i.+ne.

Stop. If you're inside, go to a window. Throw it open and turn your face to the sky. All that empty s.p.a.ce, the deep vastness of the air, the heavens wide above you. The sky is full of insects, and all of them are going somewhere. Every day, above and around us, the collective voyage of billions of beings.

That's the letter A: A: the first thing not to forget. There are other worlds around us. Too often, we pa.s.s through them unknowing, seeing but blind, hearing but deaf, touching but not feeling, contained by the limits of our senses, the ba.n.a.lity of our imaginations, our Ptolemaic cert.i.tudes. the first thing not to forget. There are other worlds around us. Too often, we pa.s.s through them unknowing, seeing but blind, hearing but deaf, touching but not feeling, contained by the limits of our senses, the ba.n.a.lity of our imaginations, our Ptolemaic cert.i.tudes.

Beauty

"What's going on? What is it?" I called out to Seu Benedito as we put-putted along the Rio Guariba in the afternoon suns.h.i.+ne. "What's happening?"

A hundred yards away on the far bank, under the heavy trees, which just yesterday had sheltered a broken wooden house, the poorest on the river, was a s.h.i.+mmering jewel, a glittering vision of fluttering yellow, canary yellow, corn silk yellow, golden yellow. Flecks of gold were spinning from it like cinders high into the dark forest. Sparkling sunbursts were spiraling out from it over the river. "What is it?"

"Oh," Seu Benedito laughed, "the borboletas de vero borboletas de vero, the b.u.t.terflies of summer. They're back. You've never seen them?"

That day they were everywhere. An explosion exploding the world, dressing it in strange new color, tripping it out with unexpected beauty. As we chugged along the river, we saw that each house we pa.s.sed had surrendered to the transformation. Thousands of yellow b.u.t.terflies had settled on roofs and walls, occupied wooden porches, finally turned Amazonia into El Dorado, encrusted this quiet village in layers of gold.

When we reached home, there were golden-yellow summer b.u.t.terflies dancing around our house too. High in the eaves, all around the porch, low in the muddy yard where the pigs rooted under the floorboards. They floated and soared, and I took a picture to hold on to that day and the few that followed before the insects left.

This is the kitchen at the back of Seu Benedito's house, near the mouth of the Amazon in the Brazilian state of Amapa. I lived here for fifteen months in 1995 and 1996, and this is what it looked like in the late-afternoon sun on the day the b.u.t.terflies arrived. Sometimes now it seems like a dream, someone else's story, so I take out this picture and think back to that day. See the sleepy hunting dog in the foreground? See the acai acai palms, with their heavy bunches of black fruit? See the two giant tires that little Helton and Rosiane filled every morning with water from the creek, just out of view to the right? See the fenced-off vegetable patch? The thick wire clothesline? See the palms, with their heavy bunches of black fruit? See the two giant tires that little Helton and Rosiane filled every morning with water from the creek, just out of view to the right? See the fenced-off vegetable patch? The thick wire clothesline? See the borboletas de vero borboletas de vero caught in time and s.p.a.ce like mini UFOs, just visiting, just stopping by, entering our lives, transforming everything just for a moment, showing us a glimmer of a different world, then pa.s.sing on? caught in time and s.p.a.ce like mini UFOs, just visiting, just stopping by, entering our lives, transforming everything just for a moment, showing us a glimmer of a different world, then pa.s.sing on?

Chern.o.byl

I look at this photo of Cornelia Hesse-Honegger in her apartment in Zurich and try to imagine what she sees through her microscope. Beneath the lens is a tiny golden-green insect, one of the leaf bugs of the suborder Heteroptera that she has been painting for more than thirty years.1 The binocular microscope magnifies to eighty times. The centimeter scale in the left eyepiece allows her to map every detail of the insect's body with precision. The binocular microscope magnifies to eighty times. The centimeter scale in the left eyepiece allows her to map every detail of the insect's body with precision.

Cornelia collected this animal close to the Gundremmingen nuclear power plant in southern Germany. Like most of the insects she paints, it is deformed. In this case, its abdomen is irregularly shaped, a little crinkled on its right side. To me, even under the microscope the deformity is all but imperceptible. But just think, she says, how such an anomaly must feel if you are only two tenths of an inch long!

What does Cornelia see when she focuses so intently on this creature? She tells me that when she's outside, collecting in fields, at roadsides, and on the edges of forests, she "loses herself in the animal." At these moments, she says, she feels "very connected, extremely connected"; she feels a deep bond, as if, perhaps, she herself had once been such a creature-a leaf bug-"and had a body remembering."

But her painting practice, as she explains it, is almost the opposite of this. When she sits down with her microscope, she no longer experiences the insect as a coevolved being but as form and color, shape and texture, quant.i.ty and volume, plane and aspect. Her work becomes as mechanical as possible. ("I want to be like a laser that goes from one square centimeter to the next. I see it, I show it; I see it, I show it," she tells me.) At times, as in the painting below, she introduces a principle of formal randomness, selecting specimens from her collection by chance and abstracting a single structure, which she repeatedly positions at designated points on the graph paper, creating an image with no preconceived final arrangement, an image whose aesthetic origins lie squarely in the tradition of concrete art, in which she was raised.

The painting shows a series of eyes from fruit flies, Drosophila melanogaster Drosophila melanogaster, that had been irradiated by geneticists at the University of Zurich's Inst.i.tute of Zoology. Although she has chosen not to show the animals' heads, Cornelia uses them as her points of reference, centering each one on corresponding squares of graph paper so that they are situated precisely in relation to the absent bodies to which they belong. But radiation has left the eyes irregularly positioned on the flies' heads, and as a result, despite the orderliness of the arrangement, the horizontal and vertical lines in the paintings are uneven. Cornelia's systematic randomness produces regularity but not uniformity, a graphic expression of an insight central to her understanding of nature, aesthetics, and science: the world, her paintings say, is governed simultaneously by stability and randomness, by principles of both order and chance. The flies' eyes are bizarre. Their size and shape vary dramatically. Several are sprouting wing parts, aberrations that allow researchers to investigate cell behavior-"like someone who studies a train by systematically letting it derail," as Cornelia puts it.2 One fly, represented by empty s.p.a.ce, has an eye missing entirely. Because she detests naturalism in painting (naturalism, she tells me, encourages the viewer to focus on the "reality" of the image, on the skill of the artist, on the artist's "vision") and because she wants us to pay attention to form, she painted the eyes black rather than a realistic red. One fly, represented by empty s.p.a.ce, has an eye missing entirely. Because she detests naturalism in painting (naturalism, she tells me, encourages the viewer to focus on the "reality" of the image, on the skill of the artist, on the artist's "vision") and because she wants us to pay attention to form, she painted the eyes black rather than a realistic red.

Cornelia painted that picture in 1987. But she first drew mutated Drosophila Drosophila twenty years earlier, as a scientific ill.u.s.trator at the Inst.i.tute of Zoology. twenty years earlier, as a scientific ill.u.s.trator at the Inst.i.tute of Zoology.3 In a standard mutagenic protocol, those flies had been fed food laced with ethyl methanesulfonate. The resulting mutations fascinated her so much that she began painting the damaged insects in her own time, experimenting with angle and color, even casting some large heads as plastic sculpture, struggling to make sense of the disturbing world she was being pulled into. At the inst.i.tute, her job was to draw the varied appearance of the so-called Quasimodo mutants. The animals were crippled and pitifully monstrous, "chaotically" deformed. In preparation for the ill.u.s.trators, the inner organs of each fly's head were dissolved with a chemical agent that left the disturbed face as a mask. "The mutants were not to leave me," she wrote. And, indeed, from that point on her activities are shadowed by the victims, actual and potential, of induced mutation. In a standard mutagenic protocol, those flies had been fed food laced with ethyl methanesulfonate. The resulting mutations fascinated her so much that she began painting the damaged insects in her own time, experimenting with angle and color, even casting some large heads as plastic sculpture, struggling to make sense of the disturbing world she was being pulled into. At the inst.i.tute, her job was to draw the varied appearance of the so-called Quasimodo mutants. The animals were crippled and pitifully monstrous, "chaotically" deformed. In preparation for the ill.u.s.trators, the inner organs of each fly's head were dissolved with a chemical agent that left the disturbed face as a mask. "The mutants were not to leave me," she wrote. And, indeed, from that point on her activities are shadowed by the victims, actual and potential, of induced mutation.4 The image opposite is among the last that Cornelia painted before making a collecting trip in July 1987 to osterfarnebo, in Sweden, the site she identified as the place in western Europe most heavily polluted by fallout from the disaster at Chern.o.byl. That journey signaled the beginning of a new phase in her life, one marked by controversy and not always welcome attention. In their unsettling combination of blank abstraction and bleak outrage, the disembodied eyes are a premonition, an antic.i.p.ation.

When the reactor exploded at Chern.o.byl, Cornelia was ready. "Chern.o.byl was just the answer to the question, What is going on here?" she told me recently. She was already a witness. She had seen the diminis.h.i.+ng numbers of leaf bugs in her garden. She had seen the monstrous fruit flies. The laboratory and the world were one. What now stood between them? She already recognized the emerging aesthetic. There was no nature immune to its effect. "We cling to images that do not correspond to changing reality," she wrote.5 Chern.o.byl was merely the nightmare exposed to the light of day, the invisible made evident. Chern.o.byl was merely the nightmare exposed to the light of day, the invisible made evident.

In 1976, Cornelia Hesse-Honegger was living quietly in the countryside outside Zurich with two young children, a self-absorbed, neglectful husband, and a pa.s.sion for leaf bugs. It wasn't simply the beauty of the insects that attracted her. There was something about their character. ("They have a kind of being aware of certain situations that I find extremely amazing," she says.) Their idiosyncrasies turned collecting into an obsession ("a kind of addiction"; "to find a leaf bug is fantastic ... it's heaven on earth!"). She rapidly grew familiar with the ones that lived nearby and started to recognize individual differences ("the individual differences are in fact astonis.h.i.+ng") as well as the more acknowledged distinctions among families and species. Summer vacations were spent at her husband's family's house in the southern canton of Ticino, rising early while the mist still clung to the landscape, roaming the wetlands, collecting her insects, becoming closer and closer to the local plant and animal life.

Collecting created one kind of intimacy. Discovering the habits of the insects and uncovering their hiding places ("I know exactly where they will be") cultivated her sensitivity to their senses ("They're lazy people!" she told me, laughing), her feeling that they know when she is near, that they feel when her eyes touch touch them. Through collecting she came to understand their ecology and their character. How could she not? And through the intense attention of painting, she developed another type of intimacy, becoming expert in their morphology and their variety. them. Through collecting she came to understand their ecology and their character. How could she not? And through the intense attention of painting, she developed another type of intimacy, becoming expert in their morphology and their variety.

Painting, she insists-reaching back to the sixteenth-century Swiss naturalist Conrad Gesner; to her inspiration, the painter-explorer Maria Sibylla Merian; to the autodidact fossil hunter Mary Anning-is research, not merely doc.u.mentation.6 It is a way of achieving multidimensional knowledge of the subject, a way to It is a way of achieving multidimensional knowledge of the subject, a way to see see it in its biological, phenomenological, and political fullness. Not simply a way to express what we see, painting is a discipline through which we learn to see-to see, that is, in the broad sense of gaining insight. Through painting, she is able to map anomaly, to recognize patterns and relations.h.i.+ps across her archive of collecting sites, to realize that she has encountered this deformity somewhere before: osterfarnebo, Chern.o.byl, Sellafield, Gundremmingen, La Hague. "It's a discovery of a new world," she says. "The more I look, the more I dive into this world, the more I can connect." If only life would allow her to spend six months painting just one leaf bug. If only ... "I would like to go deep, deep, deep, deep..." it in its biological, phenomenological, and political fullness. Not simply a way to express what we see, painting is a discipline through which we learn to see-to see, that is, in the broad sense of gaining insight. Through painting, she is able to map anomaly, to recognize patterns and relations.h.i.+ps across her archive of collecting sites, to realize that she has encountered this deformity somewhere before: osterfarnebo, Chern.o.byl, Sellafield, Gundremmingen, La Hague. "It's a discovery of a new world," she says. "The more I look, the more I dive into this world, the more I can connect." If only life would allow her to spend six months painting just one leaf bug. If only ... "I would like to go deep, deep, deep, deep..."

It is late in the evening. We have finished dinner and are admiring Galileo's famous ink washes of the moon, a series of paintings she loves ("This is art!"). Galileo made these images in 1610, sketching what he saw through his recently constructed telescope, a novelty that brought an entirely new world into focus. The sense of discovery in these pictures is claustrophobic. They have an urgency about them, as if he drew in disbelief ("what causes even greater wonder ..." he marveled), racing to capture the unimagined textures before they rotated into shadow, perhaps never to be seen again. is art!"). Galileo made these images in 1610, sketching what he saw through his recently constructed telescope, a novelty that brought an entirely new world into focus. The sense of discovery in these pictures is claustrophobic. They have an urgency about them, as if he drew in disbelief ("what causes even greater wonder ..." he marveled), racing to capture the unimagined textures before they rotated into shadow, perhaps never to be seen again.7 Cornelia tells me how Galileo's colleagues examined these drawings of what he'd seen in the night sky but were unable to recognize the objects he showed them. This was not the moon they knew. How could they trust the view through an instrument they did not understand? They were "seeing-blind," Cornelia says. So set in their thinking, so at home in their world, they looked but they didn't see, looked but made no sense of what they saw. Cornelia tells me how Galileo's colleagues examined these drawings of what he'd seen in the night sky but were unable to recognize the objects he showed them. This was not the moon they knew. How could they trust the view through an instrument they did not understand? They were "seeing-blind," Cornelia says. So set in their thinking, so at home in their world, they looked but they didn't see, looked but made no sense of what they saw.

After she left her husband and her country garden, after she moved back to Zurich with her children, after Chern.o.byl, Cornelia published the first of two cover stories in the Sunday magazine of the leading Swiss newspaper Tages-Anzeiger. Tages-Anzeiger. Under the headline "When Flies and Bugs Don't Look the Way They Should," she presented paintings of leaf bugs, fruit flies, and ivy leaves she had collected around osterfarnebo and Ticino. Under the headline "When Flies and Bugs Don't Look the Way They Should," she presented paintings of leaf bugs, fruit flies, and ivy leaves she had collected around osterfarnebo and Ticino.8 Her account of the trip to Sweden is engrossing. Part detective story, part conversion narrative, part conspiracy, it begins with her struggle to track down information about the radioactive cloud that spread west across Europe from Chern.o.byl in the days after the explosion. She finds maps ("miserably inexact") and identifies the most contaminated places to which she can gain access ("In the evenings, when the children were in bed, I pored over maps and brooded over data at the kitchen table"). Her calculations reveal that the greatest fallout in western Europe was in eastern Sweden ("and that, I decided, was where I wanted to go").

When she arrives, people tell her-as they will years later at Three Mile Island-about the strange feelings, the inexplicable foreboding they experienced the night the rain cloud broke and radioactive particles poured down on their town. A local veterinary surgeon shows her clover growing red leaves and yellow flowers instead of the green leaves and pink flowers of earlier years. She finds odd-looking plants everywhere. She collects insects, and the next day, July 30, 1987, she examines them under her microscope. She already knew that leaf bugs were exceptional biological indicators. She had observed in her garden how the precision of their anatomy made irregularities highly evident, how normal variation was generally restricted to their markings, how one bug could live its entire life on a single plant, and how its descendants might remain there too. She realized that by ingesting fluids directly from leaves and shoots, leaf bugs made themselves vulnerable to contaminants taken up by the plant. But in seventeen years of painting them, she had never seen anything like this. "I felt sick. One bug had a particularly shortened left leg, while others had feelers like shapeless sausages, and something black grew out of the eye of another." She sees everything as if for the first time.

Although I was theoretically convinced that radioactivity affects nature, I still could not imagine what it would actually look like. Now these poor creatures were lying there under my microscope. I was shocked. It was as if someone had drawn back the curtain. Every day I discovered more damaged plants and bugs. Sometimes I could hardly remember what the normal plant shapes looked like. I was confused and afraid I might be losing my mind.I realized that I had to free myself from all my prior a.s.sumptions and be completely open to what was in front of me, even at the risk of being considered mad. The horror of what I had found tortured me in my sleep and gave me nightmares. I began to collect and paint feverishly.9 She had planned it as a temporary detour.

[Chern.o.byl] happened and I thought I'd do this quickly. A year, two, maybe three-and then I'd go back to my mutated fly eyes or something. This was actually the kind of work that I liked. I didn't like to leave this work. I only did because I thought it was necessary. All those paintings [in the magazines] are on cheap paper, the cheapest paper, just from my sketching pad. It wasn't serious artwork. I was convinced that after I painted the first ones, the scientists would say, "Yes, that's really interesting. Let's run to those places and collect."

She traveled back to Ticino, to the area near her ex-husband's family's home and to the insects she knew so well. Although fallout from Chern.o.byl had been less concentrated here than in Sweden, the climate was milder. As the contamination rained down, insects in Ticino were already feeding on vegetation that had not yet sprouted further north. She collected bugs and leaves, and she found three pairs of Drosophila Drosophila, which she brought back to Zurich and bred in the kitchen of her apartment. "I sat in front of the microscope night after night trying to keep up with the rapid propagation," she wrote. It was a full-time job, but she was "possessed by the need to see and discover," and I don't think she really thought about the difficulties. She prepared special food, cleaned out the jars, accustomed herself to the stench, and tended to the exploding population. The prize, her terrible reward, was quickly apparent. "I was horrified by what I saw," she wrote.10 And again and again, in counterpoint to the refusals of the scientists, this horror is the root of compulsion. And again and again, in counterpoint to the refusals of the scientists, this horror is the root of compulsion.

In outline, it's quite simple. The international nuclear regulatory agencies-princ.i.p.ally the International Commission on Radiological Protection (ICRP) and the U.N. Scientific Committee on the Effects of Atomic Radiation-calculate the dangers of radioactivity to human health using a threshold. Although many scientists admit that the mechanisms of radiation damage to cells are poorly understood, that the composition of emissions from nuclear installations vary substantially, and that different bodies (not to mention different organs and different cells at different points in their development) respond to contamination in quite distinct ways, the threshold establishes a universal tolerance level below which emissions are considered safe. In the tense days following the disaster at Chern.o.byl, it was the logic of a fixed threshold that allowed government experts to rea.s.sure their nervous publics that the dangers were negligible.

The ICRP derives its threshold from a linear curve extrapolated from rates of genetic (reproductive) irregularities, cancer, and leukemia among the survivors of large-scale nuclear events. Since those calculations began, the prime data set has been drawn from survivors of the 1945 bombings of Hiros.h.i.+ma and Nagasaki. The initial radiation dosage at those sites was extremely large and distributed in a short period. The resulting curve emphasizes the effects of exposure to artificial radioactivity at high values. Low-level radiation, such as that emitted over long time periods by normally operating nuclear power plants, appears relatively, if not entirely, insignificant, its effects falling within the range of the "natural" background radiation emitted from elements present in the earth's crust. The a.s.sumption is that large doses produce large effects; small doses, small effects.

A number of scientists unaffiliated with the nuclear industry and frequently in alliance with citizens' groups from areas close to nuclear plants describe an alternative curve. Following work carried out in the 1970s by the Canadian physicist Abram Petkau, they argue that the effects of radiation are best captured not by the official linear curve, in which a double quant.i.ty produces a double effect, but by a "supralinear" curve, which registers far higher effects at low doses. In the supralinear curve, there is no safe minimum dose above zero.11 These researchers often begin with epidemiology, carrying out their own population surveys downwind or downstream of nuclear installations, looking for statistically significant correlations between localized cl.u.s.ters of disease and sites of low-level radiation emissions. Working from the a.s.sumption of a causal relations.h.i.+p between emissions and sickness-an a.s.sumption reinforced not only by the epidemic proportions of some of these cl.u.s.ters but also by the secrecy of the industry-their focus is on the identification of the mechanisms by which low dosage disrupts biological function.

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. .h.i.t 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. Under normal conditions, Busby argues, a cell (any cell) is. .h.i.t 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 a.s.sociated 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 a.n.a.logy 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 a.s.sumes a constant distribution of particles and a predictable effect. If, as many argue, those are invalid a.s.sumptions, 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. Tages-Anzeiger Magazin. Reiterating the official position that the fallout from Chern.o.byl 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. Reiterating the official position that the fallout from Chern.o.byl 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 Inst.i.tute, 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." 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 Inst.i.tute, 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 Chern.o.byl? 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 quant.i.ties of encouraging mail. After the first article, the opposition German Social Democratic Party called for an investigation into the local effects of Chern.o.byl. 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 Chern.o.byl. The Swiss anti-nuclear movement was vocal and politically effective, and Cornelia's bombsh.e.l.ls exploded in the media just as activists were canva.s.sing 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 ill.u.s.trator, but wasn't she nonetheless a collegial partic.i.p.ant 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 ill.u.s.trator 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. Tages-Anzeiger. Don't think you are a scientist just because you have drawn pictures for me and my colleagues, he tells her. 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 Chern.o.byl 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 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 ill.u.s.trations 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

The garden bug is from Kussaberg, 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 featureless 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 ill.u.s.tration, which, she explains, relies on nineteenth-century techniques of "light and shadow," she adopted the color perspective pioneered by Cezanne 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 s.h.i.+fts 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, ma.s.sive, 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 dispa.s.sionate, resolutely doc.u.mentary. But so thoroughly in the world, they s.h.i.+mmer 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, un.o.bserved, as her parents entertained Mark Rothko, Sam Francis, Karlheinz Stockhausen, and other luminaries in New York, Paris, and Zurich ("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 unantic.i.p.ated 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 Zurich apartment, she said, "In the end, the picture is everything. n.o.body 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 osterfarnebo. 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 ant.i.thesis: 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 Zurich, 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, gla.s.sy planes, and the refusal of figurative or even metaphorical reference. Kazimir Malevich's programmatic White on White White on White (1918), a white square painted on a white ground, is perhaps the movement's founding doc.u.ment. 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, (1918), a white square painted on a white ground, is perhaps the movement's founding doc.u.ment. 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 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, quant.i.ty, plane, angle, line, texture.

From the 1940s, the group was centered in Zurich, 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, Helio 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. 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 "non.o.bjectivist" determination to shatter the connection between art and material objects. Yet I knew from our conversations that in the moment of painting, Cornelia sees for