Biology As Art Flannery Summary

Flannery, Maura C. “Biology as Art.” The American Biology Teacher 69.5 (2007): 304–308. Print.
In this article, Flannery reviews the connection between modern art and biology, looking specifically at realism and surrealism and anatomy (of humans, plants, and animals). The first artist mentioned is Paul Stankard, who created beautiful paperweights replicating plants. Flannery notes that the weights “depict tiny human blood vessels” within the small plants (304). Surrealism in art depicting biology gives artists the ability to distort and recreate what is considered to be normal anatomy. He mentions Louise Bourgeois’ Spider (1997) and Alexis Rockman who, after travelling to Guyana, painted a rainforest with massive insects and fish, as well as other works illustrating hybrid animals and plants. An example of raw biology included in the article is Damien Hirst’s This Little Piggy Went to Market (1996), in which a pig was cut in half and placed in two glass
Bourgeois was finally given a retrospective exhibition at the New York Museum of Modern Art in 1982, when she was aged 71. This "persistence" in her art exists insofar as it stays with the viewer’s consciousness. Her work was daunting to viewers, and since most of her artwork was created on a large scale, with specific placements in mind, it grabs the audiences' attention and holds it. An example given in the article is a 5 foot plank of wood with a circular cut for an eye hole; simple, yet terrifying. Bourgeois' main themes in her work include fear (spiders were a huge symbol), anger, maternity and sexuality. She was seen as a female artist who heavily persisted against her male artist competitors before feminism unfolded. Since one of Bourgeois' main focuses was maternity, her works were considered powerful yet fragile, beautifully terrifying, and natural but