Questioning Images: Polaroids

Is the Polaroid simply the twentieth-century version of the daguerreotype?

Collect, Exchange, Display: Artistic Practice and the Medical Museum

By Dr Sarah Symmons, June 2014

The ten papers delivered in the MacRae Gallery at the Hunterian Museum on 6^th June created an enriching conference experience ably organised by Natasha Ruiz-Gómez and Mary Hunter (of McGill University). 

Funded by the Wellcome Trust, the event delivered stimulating speakers and debated surprising ideas regarding the historical development of medical museums, their place in modern culture, the changing parameters of visitor engagement and, above all, the dialogue between medical models and contemporary artworks.

Keynote Speaker Christine Borland

Julia Kristeva’s 'throng of forsaken bodies' might well have been seen as abject, inhabiting an existential void by writers in the 1970s and 80s, but the general consensus here offered very different conclusions. The cadaver, specimen and forensic reconstruction tracked a new form of beauty and identity, established by Enlightenment researchers and artists, redeveloped by the acolytes of eugenics, immortalised in the bounding lines of draughtsmen, from Gottingen to Lisbon, forming moving balletic sequences in performing art and becoming the prey of the artistic imagination. 

Keynote speaker, Christine Borland, brought the discourse up to date with her Turner Prize-shortlisted achievement in 1997, which drew inspiration from laboratory research of forensic detectives and now is evolving into new poetic reconstructions from anatomical dissections inside medical schools. Throughout these proceedings 'the bits that were you', as Philip Larkin put it, fight back with such power and elegance that there is little room for the abject. Do visitors, in fact, need protecting? Some curators, notably those at the Narrenturm in Vienna, where the opening hours are probably the most restrictive of any museum in the world, clearly believe that viewing specimens of human remains will drive spectators to insanity. Others rush to instill politically correct behaviour. Terms such as ‘dignity and respect’ were often repeated like mantra or reading the rosary when speakers defined the ‘investigative wonderment’ of Whakaaro Pai in Auckland, or avoided speculating on why medical museums declined in number and interest in the mid twentieth century. 

'Life and Death Mask I' Lisa Temple-Cox 2011

Clearly more conferences are needed to explore these fascinating phenomena, and audience discussion, often passionate, drew unique illumination from the artists. Confronting the specimen as a form of self identity, self adornment and self mutilation may well provide answers to the many questions and set a wholly new series of agendas.

http://artisticpracticeandthemedicalmuseum.wordpress.com/ 

Exhibition Spotlight: Beautiful Science: Picturing Data, Inspiring Insight

Natasha Ruiz-Gómez
April 2014

[NASA]

I was mesmerized by the video that greets the visitor to the British Library's current
exhibition, Beautiful Science: Picturing Data, Inspiring Insight. In NASA's Perpetual Ocean (2011),
ocean currents are rendered as spiraling white lines that make and unmake themselves as
they whirl across the surface of this virtual earth. The exhibition makes a powerful argument
for the critical importance of the visual in communicating scientific data and helping
scientists and others (including Florence Nightingale, whose important 'Diagram of the
Causes of Mortality in the Army' during the Crimean War is displayed nearby) to persuade
their audiences. As I stood transfixed, I became aware that I was recalling the waves and
eddies that animate Vincent Van Gogh's Starry Night (1889, New York, Museum of Modern
Art), and I was struck by the unexpected ways that art can illuminate science, and science art.

Exhibition URL: http://www.bl.uk/whatson/exhibitions/beautiful-science

Video URL: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CCmTY0PKGDs

Diagram of the Causes of Mortality in the Army in the East Florence Nightingale. Notes on matters, affecting the health, efficiency and hospital administration of the British Army. London, 1858. [BL]

Vincent Van Gogh, The Starry Night (1889) [MOMA]

Exhibition Spotlight: Georgians Revealed

By Dr Natasha Ruiz-Gómez

A short summary of my favourite exhibition so far in 2014.

Georgians Revealed: Life, Style and the Making of Modern Britain
British Library
Until March 11 2014

"Tasteful and polite, or riotous and pleasure-obsessed? Discover the Georgians as they really were, through the objects that tell the stories of their lives."
 
1. What is your favourite exhibition that you have been to so far this year?
Georgians Revealed at the British Library.

2.Who did you go with?

I went to the exhibition alone.

3. What was your favourite of art, or artist, from the exhibition?

The heeled clogs that protected the delicate shoes worn by posh ladies, so that they wouldn't get soiled on the dirty streets of England!

4. Using one word or phrase, how would you describe the exhibition?

Overwhelming.

Upcoming Conference: Artistic Practice and the Medical Museum

By Dr Natasha Ruiz-Gómez

The call for papers deadline has been and gone, and now we're sorting through all the abstracts. There is some great research out there...

For hundreds of years, medical collections have been sites of medical and artistic exchange. Not only were many of their contents created by artists and physicians, but the collections were also often compiled by doctors, who were themselves artistes-manqués. Although medical museums have recently received attention in museological and historical studies, they remain relatively ignored within art historical scholarship.

Lisa Temple-Cox, Experience 8, 2007. Mixed media.

This one-day conference will look at the anatomical, pathological or medical museum from the perspectives of art history and visual culture. Artists have utilised these spaces for the study of anatomy and pathology–as well as for ideas and inspiration–but what do we know about the artists, photographers and craftsmen and women who have worked within the museum? How can we theorise the collecting practices of the doctors who founded and/or ran these museums? What role did these spaces and their contents have on artistic practice, visual representation and the writing of art and medical histories? How does the medical museum continue to play a role in contemporary art-making and medical learning? From the wax modelers to the commissioning physicians to the painters and sculptors who were inspired by its contents, this conference will spark a dialogue about the artistry of the medical museum.

This conference will take place on 6 June 2014 in the MacRae Gallery of the Hunterian Museum of the Royal College of Surgeons, London.

We anticipate publishing a selection of papers from the conference in an edited anthology.

For further information, visit our web page

This conference is associated with the ‘The Sculpture of the Échorché’ conference at the Henry Moore Institute in Leeds on 7 June 2014.