CORNELIA
HESSE-HONEGGER
IMAGE: DROSOPHILA MELANOGASTER
The first two rows show deformed heads and eyes. This mutation is called eye-II D. The other two rows show also deformed heads in the profile of the Drosophila melanogaster. The mutation is called ey. opt. The eye is split or not there at all and out of some of the eyes, part of a wing is growing out since the cells cannot decide whether to become an eye or a wing.
Both Aquarells are 24.2 x 74 cm, painted in an aquarell miniature technique on Millimeterpaper in Zurich, 1986.
TODAY THE COGNITIVE, intellectual way is acknowledged to be more valuable and nearer to the truth than the artistic way of perception, since we divided our way of investigating into a scientific, logical world bare of any emotion - and the artistic world emotional and full of fantasies, but considered alien to everyday problems. This easy way of division, seems to give our society the rightfulness of taking any scientific research as the way of handling todays questions and the bases for political decisions. On the other hand, artistic work has become prey to anybody needing to decorate a wall, a building or for touristic purposes. We don't consider artwork to be a form of research, neither the artist a seismograph on our time.
Analogously to the extinction of species in nature, our own cultures are becoming extinct by our reliance on consumer goods. Just as we put animals in zoos, our culture is relegated to museums. In school children learn nothing about integration of arts and its meaning in their daily subjects. Painting has become a nice distraction instead of a method of learning to perceive and see what is. By using copied picture and 'virtual realities' we are loosing the perceptual abilities by which we come to grips with the world. I fear that children and future adults will become what I call seeblind. Thus handicapped, future generations will be even more victims of the forces, which rob us of our essential human nature. Even now scientists and intellectuals in our western society, which likes to believe, that individuality and freedom of expression is guaranteed, do not dare to speak up, or their research is not published if opposed to general thinking. Fear of losing research money or their jobs, causes many of them to cooperate - thus, more than half of the scientists worldwide work for the military. At the moment artists, are almost the only independent voices in our society. They cannot be stopped by financial restrictions since they are not payed properly anyhow. To understand what is going on today or coming up tomorrow, we need to learn to understand what art is saying to us.
Many years ahead of my research about deformed insects and plant life, I painted leaf bugs and flies, investigating in the extinction of species as well as in an artistic procedure of random system in the concept of my paintings. Thus I had elaborated a way of understanding random as a principle ruling todays manmade form of pollution and its effects on nature. Still, our society is characterised by a dualistic way of thinking, which prevents seeing our problems as they are. To put it in a trivalistic way: art divided by thousand = clean.
In 1987, I started my research on leaf bugs in the fallout areas from the Chernobyl accident in Sweden and the southern part of Switzerland. The reason to do this work was my worrying about the welfare of the insects in these areas as well as the observation, that no biologist had started any investigation into this question - yes at the time it was considered that low level radiation from Chernobyl was not able to damage insect or plant life in any way - thus no study was necessary in the eyes of scientists. The publication of my findings, documented with painted pictures, were therefore highly reproached by the scientific world.
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