chairs /
- Siobhan Angus, Yale University/Carleton University
- Ivana Dizdar, University of Toronto
This panel examines the production of visual culture through toxic and potentially fatal materials. Toxicity poses significant problems: medical, social, and environmental—but also artistic. We invite scholars working on topics across periods, from dangerous pigments in historical painting to toxic waste in contemporary art. What does it mean to construct with the destructive? How do artistic engagements with toxicity reframe our understanding of purity and contamination? Should we—and if so how—reconcile personal and environmental dangers with pursuits to create images and objects of beauty (i.e. the toxic sublime)? We encourage submissions from scholars working on intersections among visual culture, material history, science, environment, and the medical humanities.
keywords: toxicity, contamination, danger
K.3.1 Chemical hazards in photography: Mercury and daguerreotypes
- John McElhone, Independent
Throughout the material history of photography there has been a changing inventory of hazardous chemicals used in the darkroom. In the nineteenth and early-twentieth century, when amateurs and professionals were experimenting with black-and-white processing, poisonous or potentially reactive chemicals found their way into darkrooms. But the most acute health risks ever encountered by photographers came with the first commercially successful photographic process - the daguerreotype (1839 to c. 1860). In order to make the silvered daguerreotype plate sensitive to light it was exposed to the fumes of bromine, a substance now classified as extremely hazardous. Even more dangerous were the fumes of heated mercury that developed the latent image on the plate. All this took place at a time when little attention was paid to occupational health and safety and when the consequences of mercury exposure were not well understood. Although the burden of illness associated with the making daguerreotypes is difficult to estimate, numbers of early photographers did suffer and die as a result of practicing their craft.
John McElhone, now retired, was Chief Conservator at the National Gallery of Canada. Trained first in biochemistry, he moved into museum work and obtained a Master’s degree in art conservation in 1985. Most of his career was spent as photograph conservator for Canada’s national art collection; during that time he designed and carried out conservation treatments on thousands of photographs, notably on daguerreotypes, and published extensively on preservation and historic photographic technology. He has translated several major publications on photography from French into English. He was invited, on two occasions, for residencies at the Getty Center, Los Angeles, where he pursued research in the history of early photography.
K.3.2 Toxic Translucence: Seeing Through Plastic with Joyce Wieland
- Hana Nikčević, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Throughout the 1960s and early 1970s, Canadian artist Joyce Wieland exhibited an array of works in plastic. Stuffed and stitched, quilted and suspended, Wieland’s plastic wall hangings—unlike the fibre-based pillows and spreads they could be seen to quote—gleamed reflective and translucent, with photographs, film strips, fabrics, and other ephemera sealed away within but discernible still. Her N.U.C. (1966), for instance, featured a clear plastic heart, with stars and stripes of red, white, and blue forming its cushiony interior. The heart was hinged, however, and it opened onto a revelation: within, a neatly folded newspaper clipping reporting on American atrocities in Vietnam.
N.U.C. featured in Wieland’s landmark solo exhibition at the National Gallery of Canada, True Patriot Love/Véritable Amour Patriotique (1971). Critics noted “subtle references to Vietnam in innocuous-looking pillows” and “deceptive plastic pockets… gaudy and slick, but [informing] of Vietnam and national greed and wanton destruction of the earth.” Common to these remarks is the assessment of dichotomy between material and message: a plastic heart (shiny, sweet) belied an account of military violence within.
Here, however, I turn to Wieland’s own words about plastic, relayed in 1967 on a poster advertising the Art Gallery of Ontario’s exhibition Plastics: “The same corporate structure which leases napalm to responsible groups at reasonable rates gifts you with inexpensive fun things made of plastics. Plastic dishes are known carcinogens. Unbacked vinyl is my medium. The blues were considered low. I love you.” Considering Wieland’s artistic deployment of plastic in relation to her understanding of the material as toxic and entwined with governmental corruption, and setting this alongside the general public’s embrace of plastics and artists’ typical approaches to plastics’ materiality, I suggest that N.U.C. expressly thematizes plastics’ translucence to perform their toxic invisibility.
Hana Nikčević is a PhD student in History, Theory and Criticism of Architecture and Art at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Her current research on twentieth-century plastic artworks continues her engagement with the aesthetics of loss and deception; ecological and settler-colonial art history; and the temporal dimensions and phenomenology of objects and images. She has an MA in Art History from McGill University (Montréal) and a BA in Art History from the University of Toronto. Most recently, she oversaw collections and public programming at the Art Museum at the University of Toronto.
K.3.3 Artist Talk
- Maya Ben David, Independent
Oh fibreglass gal. I see your corrosive cotton candy figure dancing in my dreams. Your itchy cloud of micro tendrils dare not touch my flesh, you safety hazard. Your womb is my carcinogen, and you will bear me heirs. Dance for me or I will reach in, gloves off and splinter myself to oblivion. Maya Ben David is bringing moldy, rusting and asbestos-riddled sirens into your homes and hearts.
Maya Ben David (MBD) is a Toronto-based Anthropomorphic Airplane. Working in video, installation and performance, she creates worlds and characters that aid her ongoing exploration of anthropomorphism, cosplay and performative personas. Maya is currently trying to become famous on Youtube by combining the “normie” appeal of video essays with surrealist performance art.
