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The PERIODIC TABLE AS ART – Bob Salsa
I think it must be, by far, although I don't believe that it is recognized as a work of abstract art.
It is certainly abstract enough. All of those symbols of atoms. And the atoms themselves, to which the symbols refer, are not all that unabstract themselves. And the juxtaposition of those seemingly unrelated things, F then Ne then Na! the thoughtful, knowledgeable viewer, observing the periodic table will experience such a wealth of ideas, of patterns and processes.
How is this in any way unlike abstract art? Is it because the original evidence for the periodic table came from experiment? Perhaps the entire physical world is housed within it, mysteriously, deeply, with an incredible variety of patterns and Themes interrelating its objects.
Like most sources of modern art, if you are not in the know, the most wonderful relationships will go unnoticed. Both Thoreau and Emerson make just this point above. To grasp the immensity of the periodic table, one must understand ionization potentials, atomic radii, patterns of electron structure, combining capacities, electronegativities, charges on ions, etc. Etc. Imagine, they are all there. And they are essential to our understanding of the interrelatedness of our world and ourselves.
The boxes in the table are important indeed for not quite the same reason that the Museum of Modern Art (MOMA) in Manhattan humorously displayed, for many years, a kind of periodic table of ears.
Like the notes on a piano, and combinations of those notes, and the spaces between notes, and the relationships among patterns of notes, what a wealth and variety of music can emerge from just a single piano, all from those few keys.
But of course the piano is simply no match, artistically, for the bewildering array of structures and patterns which leap from the periodic table. The piano itself, and every other musical instrument, and every musician, is the stuff of the periodic table.
As I stare at the table, the lines grow dimmer and dimmer and patterns swirl about and sweep across the table as it grows larger, simmering and seething, until it encompasses the entire world and then the universe. All of nature.
It is all there.
Bob Salsa Finds High Art in the Periodic Table