“ALCHEMY. The word suggests transformative practices and the mutation of base substances into precious ones through mysterious processes that depend on secret knowledge.”
“The third-century corpus hermeticum is attributed to the mythic figure of Hermes Trismegistus, whose identity combined qualities of the Egyptian god Thoth and the Greek Hermes.”
“In a hand-colored woodcut, he is shown with calipers in hand, drawing an image of the philosopher’s stone by encircling naked male and female figures in a series of ideal geometrical forms.”
“The print, taken from a 17th-century French book, communicates symbolic and literal meanings simultaneously, like much of the imagery in the Getty Museum’s new exhibit on The Art of Alchemy.”
“Nancy Turner’s exhibit in the North Pavilion, The Alchemy of Color, which details the pigments and precious metals that were produced as part of the alchemist’s art but used for illumination.”
“These exhibits — both of which run through February 12, 2017 — are bibliographical at their core; and, in keeping with their theme of transformation, they demonstrate the remarkable capacity of books to be much more capacious in their interiors — and more resonant in their potency — than their sometimes modest dimensions would suggest.”
“Alchemy was a proto-science, and in an age when the observation of the universe was limited by the capacity of human vision, the imagination of chemical structures and processes produced conjectural understandings and explanations rooted in beliefs of perfect form and an animate universe.”
“From our contemporary perspective, the “mystery” of alchemy is long since resolved, though words associated with its practices — such as elixir, alembric, essences, and congelation — still resonate with suggestive allure.”
“The practices that formed its core, from late antiquity through the medieval era and Renaissance, were eventually disciplined into separate domains — the many realms of chemistry, including cosmetics, paint and pigment production, pharmacology, metallurgy, and so on.”
“Each of these shares with the others a dependence on transformation of materials into reconstituted form — from solid to liquid, from crude to refined, from dull to brilliant — and, in the mythic formulation of alchemical quests for transmutation, in accord with its specialized vocabulary of terms (calcination, fixation, dissolution, and so on).”
“The processes of heating, titrating, distilling, cooling, and combining through which such transformations were wrought were not understood at the molecular level.”
“Knowledge of chemistry and physics was based on the paradigms of Greek science, the work of Ptolemy and Archimedes and other canonical thinkers of the Hellenistic era.”
“From the 20th century, the exhibit features remarkable graphic works by Ernst Haeckel, whose studies of form and pattern led him to examine Kristallseelen (Liquid Crystal Souls) (1917), substances whose volatility he viewed as a link between animate and inanimate worlds.”
“These drawings echo the electrical force fields in Martinus van Marum’s Elektrisier-Maschine (1786–’98), which vibrate with the life of energy in motion.”
“Both works resonate well with the vision of contemporary physicist and philosopher Karen Barad’s 2007 book, Meeting the Universe Halfway, which develops a theory of “agential realism” that sees the physical world as imbued with agency, a marked departure from classical Newtonian mechanics.”
“Yet perhaps we do not so much know more as know differently.”
“Allegories of quantum connections across space-time and of the genetic code twisted in a helix do not strike us as metaphors. In some future time, the concept of humors, of primal elements and alchemical symbols, may appear more explanatory than they do now. But more likely, we will see our own figurations — of chemical entities, genomes, species identities — as caught in a paradigm that becomes allegorical after the fact.”
“In the present, the allegorical operation — representing one thing through the figure of another — is invisible. The figure and the knowledge pass for one another, seemingly naturally, so that we see the animal and vegetable kingdoms as distinct, living and non-living substances as divided.”
“But these notions, and their presentation in visual figures that fix the distinctions in our collective understanding, have no more claim to absolute authority than those of any other era.”
“Ultimately, I came away from this beautiful, wondrous, imaginatively rich exhibit with much more than a sense of the presence of the past. What I glimpsed was the pastness of the present. The historicity of our own contemporary moment comes through poignantly when gazing at this rich world of visions and beliefs, whose explanations of phenomena were conceived within a totalizing cosmology expressed through the vivid languages of allegory.”
“Johanna Drucker is Breslauer Professor of Bibliographical Studies in the Department of Information Studies at UCLA. She has written extensively on graphic design and digital aesthetics.”