Chemical Wedding – Image, matter and the (un)making of synthetic white
PhD Goldsmiths, University of London, Department of Art
2024
This research project traces a white substance transversally (Guattari, 1989) across diverse realms such as extractivism, chemistry, alchemy, and image-making, drawing on the methods and conceptual possibilities that emerge from art making. It brings together surprising connections across phenomena ranging from Nicole Kidman’s and Angelina Jolie’s so-called “photo flashback” malfunctions and the figure of the Pierrot clown, to John Dee’s stolen black Aztec mirror, an open-pit mine in western Norway, a pigment factory divided into a white and a black wing, and the now-demolished proto-modernist site of London’s White City.
Building on this research, I propose the methods of sludging and shifting, together with the concept of the homeorhetic, as ways of intervening in a visual regime shaped by a white chemical invention, titanium dioxide (TiO2). TiO2 is often referred to as the “whitest” and most “total” white. I argue that this pigment has been central to a new Western visual regime from the twentieth century to the present, sustained by a paradox in which chromatic whiteness appears both empty and highly charged. Through this case study, the project more broadly reimagines the relationship between image, matter, and synthetic materials.
The thesis engages with the work of Lutz Bacher and Diane Severin Nguyen, with structural and neo-structural film, Robert Wilson’s Deafman Glance (1981), and Robert Rauschenberg’s Erased de Kooning Drawing (1953).
