Katharina Lee Chichester, M.A.
Photo: Barbara Dietl
Curriculum
Katharina Lee Chichester studied Art History and Biology at Humboldt University in Berlin and at the Bard Graduate Center in New York. Her research focus is on designerly epistemics and embodied knowledge in early modern and modern arts and sciences. From 2014 to 2017, she was research associate at the Cluster of Excellence “Image Knowledge Gestaltung” at Humboldt University. In this context, she was member of the research project “Picture Act and Body Knowledge” and assistant to Prof. Dr. Horst Bredekamp as well as assistant curator in preparation of the exhibition +ultra. knowledge & gestaltung (Martin-Gropius-Bau Berlin) together with Dr. Nikola Doll. Since 2017, she has been working on her doctoral thesis dealing with designerly research in organicist biology, taking leave from D’Arcy W. Thompson’s 1917 book On Growth and Form. Her dissertation project, supervised by Prof. Dr. Horst Bredekamp and Prof. Dr. Anke te Heesen, has been funded by the German Academic Scholarship Foundation and a Fellowship at the University of St. Andrews. In 2018, she obtained funding by the Mathilde Planck Contract Lectureships program for a seminar at the State Academy of Fine Arts in Stuttgart. She is founding member of the DFG-Research-Network “Paths – Methods – Critiques: Women Art Historians 1880–1970” and the working group under the same name at the Ulmer Verein – Association for Art and Cultural Studies. Most recently, Katharina Lee Chichester curated the exhibition August Gaul. Moderne Tiere at the Museum of Fine Arts Bern and organized the conference “Colonial Animals? Animal Images in the Context of Colonialism”. Since 2014, she has been editor for ArtHist.net – Network for Art History.
Publications (selection)
- August Gaul: Moderne Tiere, exhibition catalog, Kunstmuseum Bern, ed. by K. Lee Chichester and Nina Zimmer, München: Hirmer, 2021.
- Kunsthistorikerinnen 1910–1980. Theorien, Methoden, Kritiken, ed. by K. Lee Chichester and Brigitte Sölch, Berlin: Reimer, 2021.
- „‚Snowflake Generation’ – Die Kristallisierung kosmischer (Un-)Ordnung“, in: Bilder der Kälte: Erkenntnis und Ästhetik am Gefrierpunkt (Bildwelten des Wissens), ed. by Matthias Bruhn, Berlin: De Gruyter, 2021.
- „Matters of Mathematics. Modeling Insights through Designerly Practices“, in: Design and Science, ed. by Leslie Atzmon, London: Bloomsbury, 2021 (forthcoming).
- „Von Tupfen, Rissen und Fäden. Präzision als verkörperte Praxis in der Frühen Neuzeit“, in: Bilder der Präzision (Bildwelten des Wissens), ed. by Matthias Bruhn und Sara Hillnhütter, Berlin: De Gruyter, 2018, pp. 137–152.
- „‚The Debt of Art to Nature’. A Travelling Exhibition Inspired by D’Arcy Thompson’s On Growth and Form“, in: Echoes from the Vault, St. Andrews University Library Special Collections, Blog, reachable online at https://wp.me/p1Bux8-3QN
- „Evolution und gestalterischer Prozess: Der Mythos der Optimierung“, in: +ultra. gestaltung schafft wissen, exhibition catalog, Berlin, Martin-Gropius-Bau, ed. by Nikola Doll, Horst Bredekamp and Wolfgang Schäffner, Leipzig: Seemann, 2016, pp. 85–91.
Research project: Forces, Fields, and Organisms: Gestalt-Processes as Modeling Problems in Early-20th-Century Organicist Biology
In his magnum opus On Growth and Form of 1917, the biologist D’Arcy W. Thompson sketched out a theory of formation that defines form as a diagram of forces – both in organic and inorganic nature, and in art. He thus tried to explain the wholeness evident in organisms in embryogenesis and in evolution, and famously visualized his ideas using Albrecht Dürer’s net diagrams. With the introduction of quantum and relativity theory as well as biochemistry at the beginning of the 20th century, however, new theoretical tools became available to cope with phenomena of wholeness in biology. A group of British scientists who, inspired by Thompson’s theory, met regularly in the context of the Theoretical Biology Club throughout the 1930s, sought to apply the concepts of electromagnetic fields, ‘physical gestalts,’ dynamic equilibria, and emergence to elucidate self-regulatory processes in organisms. With this ‘Third Way,’ which they termed ‘organicism,’ they hoped to resolve the age-old conflict between mechanists, who interpreted organisms as machines, and vitalists, who believed in the existence of an inexplicable life force.
At the same time, they recognized the modeling problem that went along with organicism early on, as it meant replacing mechanist concepts, paradigmatic since the 17th century, with images of wholeness, force, and process. They hence looked to the arts of British Constructivism, which experimented with dynamic equilibria, force effects, and processuality, as well as to the ‘all-overness’ of American Expressionism, which seemed to make the interaction of physical fields bodily perceptible, to find more adequate images for thought. The research project aims to analyze how representatives of British organicism of the 1930s to 1960s came to surprising modeling solutions by collaborating with artists of their time and how, in doing so, they contributed to an early theorization of the value of art to science.
Research results: Forces, Fields, and Organisms: Gestalt-Processes as Modeling Problems in Early-20th-Century Organicist Biology
During my time as Junior-Fellow at the CAS, I was able to complete not only my dissertation chapter on the reception of D’Arcy W. Thompson’s theory of a force-based morphology by members of the so-called Theoretical Biology Club (TBC) during the 1930s and ‘40s, but also finalized my last chapter dealing with the exhibition “Growth and Form” that was curated by the artist Richard Hamilton at the Institute for Contemporary Arts (ICA) in London in 1951.
In the 1930s, Thompson’s concept of mechanical forces forming the organism was succeeded by the post-Newtonian concept of electromagnetic fields. The members of the TBC adopted the concept of the morphogenetic field developed by the Viennese biologist Paul Weiss. Weiss had based his ideas on the so-called “physical Gestalten” introduced by Berlin Gestalt-psychologist Wolfgang Köhler, using them to explain self-regulatory phenomena in embryos – the organic “Gestaltungsprozess” (formative process). By accepting an isomorphism between psychological, physiological and physical Gestalt-effects, also artworks became relevant to the scientists’ search for the foundations of holistic organization. Approaching organisms as wholes, the members of the TBC referred to their line of work as “organicism” – as opposed to vitalism or mechanism. Their interest in art was motivated by epistemic as well as political aims: They hoped that art could assist in popularizing the organicist way of thinking in terms of processes, relations and interdependencies, and hence create a new “common sense” that could lead the ways towards Socialism. Against this backdrop, the exhibition “Growth and Form” can be read as an organicist manifesto – an experiment in “vision in motion” meant to reveal unseen patterns in reality that span the realms of the organic and the inorganic, as well as art and society.