Search Results for ‘skeleton’
Greenhouse, Chelsea Physic Garden
As I file away the debris of the last year, I realize that I never finished posting about my week in London this summer. It was exhausting, but by no means exhaustive. I feel foolish that I didn’t plan ahead! But I did hit the major highlights: on Sunday I saw the Chelsea Physic Garden with Neurophilosphy’s Moheb. On Tuesday I visited the shiny new Wellcome Collection, right around the corner from University College London. Thursday was Sir John Soane’s Museum, the Victoria & Albert Museum, and the Natural History Museum. On Friday I dropped by the Royal College of Surgeons, which houses both the Hunterian Museum and the Wellcome Museum of Anatomy and Pathology. (Wellcome’s name is all over the place, because it’s the UK’s largest independent charitable trust funding medical research. I can’t quite determine if they’re richer than HHMI. . . isn’t that the non-profit equivalent of “richer than Croesus”?) I’ve already posted about the Hunterian Museum & Wellcome Museum. Today I want to add some notes about a few other destinations.
Wellcome Collection
The Wellcome collection has thee exhibit galleries - a changing exhibition downstairs, and two upstairs galleries which feature artifacts from Wellcome’s personal collection and contemporary science-influenced art. The current exhibition is “Sleeping and Dreaming,” but during my visit it was “The Heart,” interleaving medical illustrations and models of great historical significance (art/texts by da Vinci, Harvey, and Galen; varnished wood anatomical tables; a wax model of a dissected, Venus-like torso; etc.) with popular portrayals of the heart as seat of love & soul. Here’s the exhibition summary:
The heart, widely understood as the place where life begins and ends, has always featured as a potent symbol in our religions, myths and rituals. Modern medical science has taught us that much of the power and influence traditionally attributed to the heart actually lies in the brain. Nevertheless we remain reluctant to let go of the notion - deeply rooted in everyday language and imagery - that the heart is the home of our emotions and of our true character.
This exhibition looked at the evolution of our understanding of what the heart is, what it does and what it means. Concentrating primarily on Western medicine and culture, it brought together objects and images from the histories of both science and art, as well as from everyday life.
It followed the development of our anatomical knowledge of the heart, but also considered its far-reaching cultural and symbolic significance. Why is it that the pump that circulates our blood is so intimately bound up with the way we discuss our emotional and moral lives, and so central to the question of the relationship between body and soul?
It’s an interesting question, and the answer is by no means obvious. Now that everyone knows the brain is where “love” resides, why do we still return to the heart as the symbol of deep emotion? The brain isn’t very romantic in appearance, but neither is the heart - it’s actually quite a gruesome and unattractive organ, wrapped in a nasty tough membranous sac and swaddled in fat (it’s really horrifying how much fat is packed around the hearts of even individuals of normal weight). The exhibit successfully explored that contradiction, without ever getting too esoteric. While you can no longer see it in person, and unfortunately photography was not allowed, you can view selected images on line here.
Other feature of the Wellcome collection included a selection of biomedicine-inspired art, including giant wax insect models (vectors that transmit malaria), glass models of viroids, and provocative pieces like John Isaacs’ “I can’t help the way I feel” (below). These were intermixed with the educational - a bound set of volumes representing the human genome, interactive computer games - and, in the next room over, the voyeuristically bizarre - chastity belts, vintage fetishes, and prosthetic limbs from Sir Henry Wellcome’s personal collection. Something for everyone!
Wax models of malaria vectors
Wellcome Collection
I can’t help the way I feel (2003)
John Isaacs
“In this work lies an interest in a possibility of the emotional landscape of the body becoming manifest in its surface. Visually, the way in which the flesh grows, erupts, and engulfs the body can be seen as a metaphor of the way in which we become incapacitated by the emotional landscape in which we live and over which we have little control. The body also appears to be suffering from some kind of malignancy, as in cancer, but for me, the image of the figure, coupled with the title, leads one into an open contemplation of the plight of the individual.” - John Isaacs
HIV Virus Sculpture (2004)
Luke Jerram
“This sculpture was created in response to the constant bombardment by coloured images we receive through the media. Many of these images are designed to communicate fear. The artificial coloring of images also affects what we think a virus looks like.” - Luke Jerram
Additional destinations
Unfortunately, squeezing even half of London’s museums into a week-long visit is impossible. And if you’re a devotee of biological specimens and medical history, the places you’d like to see are probably not in your guidebook, because most people think they’re “icky.” So here are a few insights I gained on my trip and would like to share.
First, be aware that many museums are closed Mondays. Most are open only between 10 and 5; you might want to eschew lunch to maximize your viewing time, or eat on the run. The Tube goes almost everywhere you’ll need, so buy an Oyster card; a week’s pass for zones 1-2, which can be coded onto your Oyster card, is probably a good idea as well. But the Tube is slow, especially on weekends, so plan ahead - you don’t want to waste an hour of that precious 10-5 window in transit from Holborn to Chelsea!
Natural History Museum, London
The British Museum: Mummies, Lindow Man. Be prepared: the Egyptian exhibits are noisy and busy, especially on the weekend. Lindow man, on the other hand, is totally neglected, probably because he looks like a dried up omelet. When you become homicidal towards tour groups, seek him out in the corner of room 50.
Lindow Man: not terribly photogenic, is he?
British Library “Treasures” (Ritblat Gallery) - Harvey’s De Motu Cordis, letter from Darwin to Wallace, various herbal and medical manuscripts. Alas, no photography allowed - but go to the website, they have some lovely images there.
University College London: Pure randomness, in that collegiate what-shall-we-stick-in-our-glass-cabinets? sense. But it’s right around the corner from the Wellcome Galleries, so why not pay your respects to the Auto-Icon of Jeremy Bentham (his skeleton, dressed in his clothes, with a wax head, sitting in what appears to be an antique telephone booth). So wierd.
The Auto-Icon of Jeremy Bentham, with wax head
Stuffed taxidermic primate, likely quite evil, UCL
The Chelsea Physic Garden: Second-oldest apothecaries’ garden in England (oldest is at Oxford). Snag a tour guide for the best experience, since the map and labels don’t do much good. Then seek out the small glass cases of medical oddities in the back of the gift shop. The garden is only open in the afternoon, on certain days, so you’ll have to plan around it, but it’s extraordinarily peaceful (especially after the British Museum). And the walk through Chelsea is lovely.
Vintage drug paraphernalia? Chelsea Physic Garden
The Wellcome Library (same location as the Wellcome collection, but slightly different hours): You need to come prepared, knowing what you want to view. Research in advance! I didn’t! Damn!
January 13th, 2008 cicada
Wounds (2007)
Nicole Natri
I ran across this collage by the talented Nicole Natri shortly after attending an interesting lecture, “When Sleeping Beauty Walked Out of the Anatomy Museum,” by Kathryn Hoffmann, who is a professor of French at the University of Hawai’i at Manoa. The connection here is pretty cool, but it’s roundabout, so bear with me.
Dr. Hoffmann’s talk was my introduction to Pierre Spitzner’s traveling museum, the “Musee Spitzner”: a collection of anatomical models, moulages, specimens, paintings, dioramas, etc., that toured Europe for about a century before being dismantled circa WW2. Some of the Spitzner pieces ended up at the University of Paris, but unfortunately many others are now lost. The Spitzner’s centerpiece was a wax anatomical model of a sleeping woman, which opened to reveal her internal organs - much like the Anatomical Venus by Susini at La Specola, but simpler in execution. Unlike Susini’s model, however, the Spitzner Venus had a mechanical movement intended to emulate breath: her chest rose and fell as she lay there in her white nightgown. That’s a dramatic dissolution of the distinction between life, sleep, and death - and with its vivisectionist overtones, quite disturbing!
As if the breathing, sleeping Venus wasn’t interesting enough in her own right, the Surrealist painter Paul Delvaux, known for depicting languid naked (or nightgowned) women wandering the streets of Paris, was heavily influenced by the Spitzner collection (as mentioned in a recent post over at Morbid Anatomy). He encountered it at the Brussels Fair in 1932. Delvaux painted the Spitzner itself several times (The Musee Spitzner, 1943, below), but I didn’t realize until Professor Hoffmann’s talk how direct the connection is.
Compare Delvaux’ Sleeping Venus (1944) to Susini’s Anatomical Venus (the Spitzner’s wax Venus did not look exactly like this, but was probably close). Then compare The Musee Spitzner (as David Scott recommends in his book, Surrealizing the Nude) to Wiertz’ La Belle Rosina (1847):
The Sleeping Venus (1944)
Paul Delvaux
Anatomical Venus
Clemente Susini
Musee Spitzner (reproduction; original destroyed; 1943)
Paul Delvaux
La Belle Rosina (1847)
Antoine Wiertz
I always thought all these skeletons and somnambulant nudes were simply Delvaux’s bizarre imagination run amok. But it appears Delvaux was just as obsessed with, and influenced by, medical curiosities as we are today. (Life and death, you know - heavy stuff!)
In The Musee Spitzner this [juxtaposition of living structure and emblem of death] is achieved by the creation of a masterly confluence of related themes. First, there is the almost scientific interest Delvaux shows, like so many figurative painters, in the structure of the human body, both in its skeletal form and in its musculature (Delvaux had studied his Vesalius). The skinned male thus appears in The Musee Spitzner, as it appears the following year in another version of the Sleeping Venus, in which it stands before wall-charts illustrating various aspects of the male anatomy. (Surrealizing the Nude, David Scott; the ecorche, or skinned male specimen, Scott describes is in the back left of The Musee Spitzner, and unfortunately barely visible behind the seated woman in the image above.)
So how do we circle back to that Nicole Natri collage, Wounds, at the beginning of the post? Well, another fascinating thing Dr. Hoffmann shared about the Spitzner was that many of the wax surgical models, particularly the obstetrics models, were festooned with disembodied surgical hands! No arms, just cuffed wrists and hands, “operating” on the models. Yikes! I think I find this image more disturbing than the “breathing” wax Venus.
Most anatomical models I’ve seen are arranged cleanly, even elegantly, as if they had always been so - without blood or signs of surgery. A few obligingly hold their bodies open, or pose to show their innards to the viewer: fantasies that pleasantly veil the reality of death. (See my previous post on this topic for examples). But disembodied, foreign hands opening the body for the viewer evoke both the messy, unaesthetic surgery that is really required to reveal those inner structures, and the undeniable fact that, fantasy aside, the body itself is not in control of its own revealing. No matter how drowsy, ecstatic, or peaceful the Venuses look, they’re invaded - if only by our eyes. The hands make that invasion overt; the anonymity of the hands makes them universal. How many hands, over the years, have opened Susini’s Venus, and unfolded her organs? Is invasion the ominous force that permeates Delvaux’s Sleeping Venus - who lies oblivious, while her distraught doppelgangers wail?
Nicole’s piece captures my own disquiet perfectly. The disembodied hands and surgical implements are black-and-white, from another world than the technicolor body underneath them. Their intentions seem ambiguous. Are they clinical, or just curious? And what’s our excuse for looking, anyway?
More:
Kathryn Hoffmann’s 2006 article, “Sleeping Beauties in the Fairground,” in Early Popular Visual Culture
November 24th, 2007 cicada
If you didn’t get enough skulls last night, here’s an interesting art show via Simplistic Art.
Lustmord Table
Jenny Holzer, 1994
And some Embroidered skeletons by Angelo Filomeno, via Ullabenulla:
The Grand Circus: Death of Presumptuous Philosopher
Embroidery on silk shantung
Angelo Filomeno, 2005
And the granddaddy of skeleton art is of course Sedlec Ossuary, Czechoslovakia.
A few pictures from The Flying Kiwi via Ullabenulla:
And a beautiful, intimate photostream of Sedlec from Curious Expeditions:
Bone chalice
Curious Expeditions
November 1st, 2007 cicada
Swarm (detail)
mixed media
Tessa Farmer, 2004
from the Saatchi Gallery
Before their nursery sanitization, fairy tales were savage. Remember how Cinderella’s stepmother mutilated her own daughters’ feet to fit the glass slipper, but was betrayed by the oozing blood? Or the rape and cannibalism in early versions of Sleeping Beauty? If you don’t, then you haven’t read the oldest versions of these now toothless, Disneyfied stories. Fairy tales once captured the primal violence in human nature all too well.
Fairies themselves were often grotesque and inhumanly cruel, and that’s the pre-Victorian tradition to which the work of artist Tessa Farmer cleaves. Her work juxtaposes dead insects and the remains of birds and snakes with tiny, skeletal fairy sculptures so small, she needs a microscope to assemble them, and viewers need a magnifying glass to appreciate them. Unlike the rosy-cheeked, butterfly-winged fairy girls you find on greeting cards, Farmer’s corpselike fairies rip their prey apart bare-handed, gnawing on the legs of hapless insects like ravenous, humorless Gollums. I would normally find a dead, twisted spider corpse disgusting, but Farmer’s gremlins are far creepier than their victims.
Swarm (detail)
mixed media
Tessa Farmer, 2004
from the Saatchi Gallery
A 2006 review by Stephen Feeke describes Farmer’s later work, The Terror:
Talking with Tessa Farmer about her work made me think of spiteful little boys who delight in pulling the wings off daddy-long-legs (sic). Seemingly inexplicable, this kind of puerile cruelty actually creates an understanding of the natural world. Pulling something apart helps us to learn how it was put together and how it functioned; it teaches us about life and death and this knowledge helps us to assert our dominance over nature. . .
Farmer is at the centre of all this action. She is complicit in the behaviour of her fairies and yet oddly speaks as if she is removed from it. Distancing herself from the possible carnage the fairies are hatching, she delights in the suggestion that they have the potential to exist independently of her. In this way she heightens our experience of the work, encouraging us to believe it might all be possible and true. Bearing in mind what happened to Dr Frankenstein, however, presumably Farmer herself is at as much risk as the rest of us.
In the artist’s own words,
In 2005 I first observed parasitic behaviour among the fairies, which had shrunk to some 7mm tall. ‘Nymphidia’ (named after a sixteenth century fairy poem by Michael Drayton) is another swarm, again revealing scenes of torture and consumption. The focus of the attack is a wasps’ nest, surrounded by fairies battling with wasps and other insects. On closer inspection they can be seen hatching out of wasps in the cells of the nest, by pushing off their heads and climbing out of the hollow shell of the consumed wasp.
The interesting thing to me is that, in reviews and comments on Farmer’s work, and in her own statement, the violence is described in increasingly naturalistic, pseudo-scientific terms. Are these “fairies” or “parasites”? Are they out of nature, or embodying nature? Is Farmer-the-artist, like Dr. Frankenstein before her, a meticulous scientist who reanimates flesh in order to understand it, or a monomaniac blind to the moral implications of her creation? Tennyson’s “Nature, red in tooth and claw” never seemed so appropriate!
At dinner last night, I disgusted my companions by sharing the appalling reproductive habits of the mite Acarophenax tribolii (courtesy of the Evilutionary Biologist - I warn you, it’s icky). I wish I could claim I was inspired in this misbehavior by Halloween, but as a biologist, I wander into inappropriate dinner conversation all the time. I can’t help it, really. Thinking about it scientifically, objectively, blunts the horror that kicks in when one begins to instinctively anthropomorphize the mites. Curiosity dominates empathy, and fascination displaces disgust - at least for a time. Biology is full of violence and broken taboos, but these natural relationships carry only the moral baggage we bring to them. The mites don’t know how to live any other way, and judging them or reviling them for it is absurd.
The way Farmer speaks of her work, with clinical detachment, is an invitation to follow her into a morally neutral scientific space. She must know full well that the viewer will be unable to sustain that detachment, because her fairies are not mites. They’re nearly human. And we also empathize with the fairies’ helpless victims - birds, ladybugs, bees, even that unlucky spider, curled and twisted in attitudes of pain that are universal. So despite our best efforts to remain detached, we won’t. Like looking at an optical illusion that oscillates from an old woman to a young girl, or a vase to a pair of profiles, we’ll find ourselves identifying first with the victims, then with the cruel aggressors (in these battles, the fairies seem to rarely be at a disadvantage).
By doing this - by forcing human emotions onto her invented ecosystem - Farmer alludes to the destructive effect humans have had on our world. In the scene below, from Nymphidia, a corpselike fairy erupts from a parasitized honeycomb, snaring an unsuspecting wasp. Nymphidia predates the news of honeybee colony collapse disorder (CCD) - but isn’t it an appropriate representation? Some unknown force, which we may as well depict as a wasp-sized demon, is invading beehives and destroying colonies in the “real” world. This fairy is the wasp/bee Grim Reaper: fanciful, inaccurate, but standing in for a destructive force that actually exists. And it’s fitting that the tiny Reaper is anthropomorphic, because CCD is almost certainly is due to human influence: something in our husbandry practices is making the bees vulnerable.
Nymphidia (detail)
Mixed media
Tessa Farmer, 2005
via Miniature Worlds
In the end, Farmer’s art is barely about “fairies” at all. That is, it’s barely about Disneyfied fairies: Tinkerbell, wishes, magic, romance. It is, of course, very much about the cruel, atavistic fairies of the primal fairy tales - disturbing representations of the extremes of human nature. And it’s human nature that pits us against Nature.
My lingering question about Farmer’s work is this: do the fairies know any better? Are they, like the mites, innocent by reason of insentience? Or are they, like the humans whose skeletons they mimic, not merely violent, but unnecessarily, deliberately cruel? I’d like, as a biologist, to embrace the former. But I think - based especially on her use of words like “torture” - that Farmer intends us to believe the latter. We are Farmer’s fairies. Nature, and we, suffer for it.
October 27th, 2007 cicada
La Belle Rosina (Two Young Girls)
Antoine Wiertz, 1847
Morbid Anatomy has some excellent posts lately - if it’s not on your blogroll already, you should go investigate! I was particularly taken with this painting. I suppose it’s memento mori, and I should be thinking about my own mortality and all. Or - wearing my former-anatomy-professor hat - admiring that nice skeleton. But my first impression was astonishment that the living girl - obviously meant to symbolize blooming health - is so Rubenesque. Scholar Peter Gay calls her “strapping,” and she is - strapping in the healthiest sense of the word. I wish I had as little cellulite as she does! The Belgium-born Wiertz, a somewhat controversial but popular painter in his own time, was clearly influenced by Rubens. Today, most Americans would probably consider Wiertz’s nude overweight - what is she, a 12? Egad!
Bless those Romantics, who would no doubt have found Britney Spears too bony in her recent VMA appearance, and would have fattened her up with some nice mutton and beer. (Or, alternatively, bled her. I didn’t say the last century was all good).
It’s also worth noting that in this picture, “beautiful Rosine” is the skeleton, not the living girl. So says the helpful label pasted to her skull.
September 26th, 2007 cicada
Pecoxus Ferexus
ink and resin
Dustin Yellin , 2006
Resin blocks are commonly used to preserve medical specimens so they can be viewed from all angles without the prgressive fragmentation of a specimen suspended in solution. But in artist Dustin Yellin’s hands, resin is used to deceive: “specimens” such as the one above are not really solid objects, but illusions created using ink. And although the result is convincingly 3D, like a true biological specimen, it can defy classification. Consider the Pecoxus above - is it flora or fauna? Are those skeletonized leaves or the brittle wings of an insect?
According to Culture Catch,
The art of Dustin Yellin is a cross between painting and sculpture, science and science fiction. His magical objects, some taller than the viewer, are comprised of dozens of layers of resin that are meticulously painted with acrylic and inks - layer atop layer - until a sinuous “life form” appears that looks like it would be at home in sea, sand, or air.
Each object is a comment on nature, genetic experimentation, color and form, culminating, in this reviewer’s mind, in some of the freshest and most distinct art being made today. I was reminded, even before I saw the exhibition’s title, of suspended animation because these works are expressions frozen in time. And they have an otherworldly feel, like encapsulated specimens brought back from space exploration, that gives the entire installation a strange viral cast. (source)
It’s absolutely exhausting imagining the process that must go into Yellin’s work. My favorite is this one, which reminds me of some kind of transdimensional alien overlord from Dr. Who. . .or wait. . . is that the Eye of Sauron?
Xexus Knotilus
resin and ink
Dustin Yellin, 2007
Thanks to peacay for yet another heads-up on this one!
September 23rd, 2007 cicada
Syphilitic skull with three trephine holes and osteomyelitic lesions
Hunterian museum
One of my favorite London experiences was my visit to the Hunterian museum. If only I had more time there! I liked it so much, I returned on my last day, procrastinating my departure for Heathrow as long as possible.
The Hunterian is tucked away inside the Royal College of Surgeons of England, on Lincoln’s Inn Fields. In its Victorian incarnation, it was a wonderful multi-tiered gallery with railings, balconies, and suspended skeletons:
Illustrated London News, 1845
The Hunterian Gallery before the wars (source)
So I was shocked when I entered the grey, columned Royal College, climbed a graciously curving stairway, and found this extremely modern, two-story crystal-and-glass atrium:
The Crystal Gallery at the Hunterian Museum, Royal College of Surgeons
Definitely not what I was expecting! But it grew on me. I love ornate curiosity cabinets, but there is something very elegant about unadorned bones, and simple glass jars. Biological structures are so rich with intrinsic beauty, there’s no real need to gild the lily (that means you, Damien Hirst).
Though the new Hunterian galleries are peaceful and refined, I felt a slight pang of regret for the railings and wood cabinetry Darwin would have touched, when he studied here in the 1830s and 40s. Unfortunately, many of the specimens Darwin saw were destroyed when the Royal College of Surgeons was bombed in 1941. Like the gallery housing it, John Hunter’s collection is no longer what it once was. But what remains is still pretty darn amazing.
Hunter, a renowned surgeon and fellow of the Royal Society, worked tirelessly to collect medical anomalies like the 7′7″ skeleton of the Irish Giant, Charles Byrne (for which Hunter paid 130 pounds). He also amassed thousands of less exotic teaching specimens: though he did not have access to formaldehyde, he took wet preservation in alcohol to its highest level. After Hunter’s death in 1793, his ~13,000 specimens were purchased by the British state. The collection would be maintained (and enlarged) by the Royal College of Surgeons for the next two hundred years.
Hunter’s collection is organized according to some rather unusual curatorial precepts. As a physician and early experimentalist, Hunter was less interested in taxonomy than in physiology. He grouped specimens not by family or type, but as exemplars of processes - mouthparts and digestion, reproduction, etc. From the Victorian perspective,
The design of Mr. Hunter, in making this collection, was to exhibit the gradations of nature, from the most simple state in which life is found to exist, up to the most perfect and most complex of the animal creation, man himself. By his art, he was able to expose and preserve in a dried state, or in spirits, the corresponding parts of animal bodies; so that the various links in the chain of a perfect being may be readily followed and clearly understood. (Mogg’s New Picture of London and Visitor’s Guide to its Sights, 1844)
But Hunter’s collection does not exemplify linear progression, so much as ramification: the incredible diversity of ways that animal forms have evolved to accomplish given functions. Most of the specimens displayed here are not human; the Hunterian is a shrine not to Man, but to our entire extended family.
I first heard of the Hunterian through the delightful book Stuffed Animals and Pickled Heads: The Culture of Natural History Museums
, by Stephen Asma at Columbia College, Chicago. (I highly recommend this book, if you don’t own it already). Asma’s first impression of the Hunterian was similar to my own:
Without a grasp of Hunter’s underlying principles, the cases seemed slightly irrational. In one case, marked “Digestion,” I found various dissections of mammals, parasitic worms, a cicada, a locust, slugs, a squid, a vulture, a woodpecker, and a puffin. This hodgepodge arrangement follows no taxonomic grouping. . . Individual species, genera, and even families are displayed together to illustrate the unique ways that their structures fit the functions of digestion, circulation, respiration, and so forth. (Stuffed Animals and Pickled Heads, 63)
My copy of Pickled Heads has been with in storage with the rest of my belongings for months, so I’d forgotten Asma’s words. But when I walked up to the first case of Hunter’s jars (mouthparts of squid, beaks, teeth, mouthparts of bees and cicadas), I immediately remembered Asma’s description, and recognized what he meant. The intestines of fish were right next to the stomachs of mammals, including a rat which substantially outweighed the tiny human fetus next to it. There is no mistaking the idiosyncratic style of this little museum, so different from the aggressively educational dioramas of the London Natural History Museum or the Smithsonian Natural History Museum. Modern biology museums are full-color, multimedia entertainment factories - it’s a way to engage the audience, true, but it sometimes teeters toward the tawdry and didactic. Asma expresses the difference far better than I could:
Perhaps the most notable aspect of the Hunterian Museum–besides the bleached and bloated “monsters”–is that it’s not intended for a lay audience. The Hunterian doesn’t really care whether the average person is “getting it.” This is unexpectedly unnerving, since most other museum encounters come complete with torrents of helpful information. Almost every museum specimen that you have ever encountered, be it a fossil, a jar, or a mount, is accompanied by a plaque, a chart, or a recording that announces to you–even before a question has been formulated in your head-”what you are seeing is so and so. . . .”
What was Hunter trying to communicate when he grouped his specimens? This question alone gives one a more interactive relationship with the museum than any computer gadgetry could. (Stuffed Animals and Pickled Heads, 78-79)
It’s a little unfair to say the Hunterian doesn’t care if visitors “get it.” I saw a class of kids around twelve years old when I was there, moving in and out of a room set aside for teaching purposes, and they seemed to be “getting it” pretty well. The point is, they were being allowed to draw their own conclusions, and with a little guidance, to simply wander and wonder. Refreshing indeed.
What do I do when confronted with a mute collection of natural wonders? Why, break out the sketchbook. But I didn’t have one! It’s been so long since I felt peaceful enough to sketch in a museum - I’m normally buffeted by thousands of obnoxious children, and worse, tourists who act like children. I wasn’t prepared. I had to buy a little 5″x8″ Moleskine at a nearby bookshop, and sketch with a mechanical pencil while sitting on the floor. Since the museum does not allow photography, not even for earnest, sincere bloggers, these little doodles are all I have to represent Hunter’s myriad curiosities. I can’t believe I didn’t even get to the bound foot, or the lion with rickets, or the male and female ivory anatomical models. Argh.
Sepia officinalis (preparation showing the mouthparts of a cuttlefish)
Hunterian Museum
If you are active in the biomedical professions (and yes, they will ask for proof of this, like an ID card) you may also visit the Wellcome Anatomy and Pathology Museum upstairs.
At first glance, the Wellcome collection seems like the neglected younger sibling of the Hunterian prodigal son (or, if you prefer, the Harry-under-the-stairs to the spoiled Hunterian Dudley Dursley). It’s one outdated, drab room, filled with hundreds of specimen jars. No sexy lighting or pedagogical dioramas here - to figure out what you’re viewing you have to thumb through well-used, slightly sticky binders of notes. These binders are tucked in shelves or tables, wherever the last user left them; I couldn’t find one of the binders at all, so I’m still in the dark about some of the skeletal abnormalities I saw.
But the biggest difference is that the Wellcome specimens are all Homo sapiens, representing a variety of obscure, rare, or dramatic medical conditions - conditions, like keratin horns, that I never expected to personally see in the flesh! And they’re generally in better condition than the Hunterian specimens (most date from the 20th century). I could have spent five to ten minutes examining a single specimen, and there are hundreds of prosections in the Museum. I was completely overwhelmed, and didn’t sketch a single thing (sorry).
I wondered why the Hunterian and Wellcome collections were spatially isolated in this way, and the Wellcome closed to the public. It couldn’t be about shock value - some of the Hunterian exhibits were pretty gruesome. So I asked the head of conservation, who told me that it has to do with the legal status of the collection.
The UK has a long history of scandalous “body-snatching” (see this Curious Expeditions post for more on that nefarious activity). Since the 1832 Anatomy Act, enacted to discourage the illicit sale of body parts, specimens like those in the Wellcome collection have been more and more tightly restricted. Since 2006, the Human Tissues Authority has regulated the donation, disposal, and use of medical specimens and cadavers, and requires special licesning for the public display of remains from persons who died since 1906 (according to their FAQ, they also require licenses of plastination exhibits, such as Body Worlds). But since John Hunter lived, collected, and died years before the Anatomy Act, his collection can be displayed without the restrictions that impact the pathology collection.
Skull of 25-year-old man showing enlargement due to hydrocephalus
Liston collection at Hunterian Museum
I highly recommend both the Hunterian and Wellcome collections to any biologist, artist, kunstkammer fan, or interested layperson visiting London. The Hunterian is perfectly suitable for older children, and surprisingly peaceful for a (free!) museum so close to both the British Library and Inns of Court. There were tourists everywhere, but only a handful stopping by to see John Hunter’s life’s work. You might make a day of it and also visit the Wellcome Collection, around the corner near UCL, or Sir John Soanes Museum, which is literally across the street - but then, I still need to post about those, don’t I?
So much to see, so much to blog, so little time. What a wonderful world.
September 9th, 2007 cicada
Shmoo
Michael Paulus
Wait - I don’t believe that a Shmoo even HAS a skeleton. Isn’t it entirely cytoplasmic? Or am I thinking of yeast?
I do like the little vestigial arms - kind of like the rudimentary, internal “hindlimbs” of whales and pythons. How did the Shmoo evolve, anyway? Did the proto-shmoo have opposable thumbs? How could evolution possibly select for the bizarrely self-destructive altruism of a Shmoo?
Uh oh. This is not a productive line of thought. Stopping now.
August 28th, 2007 cicada
The LA Times recently reviewed Body of Work: Meditations on Mortality from the Human Anatomy Lab
, a memoir by medical resident Christine Montross. I’ve been trying to decide if I want to read it, and I’m still uncertain. Although a relative novice when it comes to medicine (my degree is in molecular biology), I taught anatomy using human cadavers, and have dissected them. I never found cadavers the least bit disturbing. But I may be unusual in my detachment - my students reacted with disgust, distress, nervousness - and constant anxiety that their reactions weren’t normal.
But what is normal? How should we relate to a donated cadaver in the anatomy lab - as a person, or a thing? Some reactions seem to be universal - gallows humor, for example. Humans have been laughing at death since long before Shakespeare. (What other weapon do we have? Death always wins, and the cadaver’s the un-living proof of it.) We have some general rules of conduct - for example, treating the cadaver with respect, keeping the pieces of the various cadavers separate, covering face and genitals when they are not being examined. But such rules seem to be mostly for the students’ comfort, since it’s hard for a cadaver to retain modesty or dignity, at least in a traditional sense, when skin is missing and viscera are exposed.
Students respond to cadavers in personal ways, based on their own family histories, so one student’s experience of dissection is unlike any other’s. Everyone sees the cadaver differently: is this a person, or a patient, or a body, or a teaching specimen, or an illustration. . .? When students take limbs from a skeleton and hold them up to their own arms, turning them to determine the correct orientation, they enact a little unconscious ritual: memento mori. One student was fine with the cadavers until her grandmother passed away; after that, she found the cadaver so disturbing she couldn’t be in the same room with it. The boundaries of life and death, previously comfortably clear, had blurred intolerably. Before class began, students came to me, concerned that they might find the body of a deceased relative in the lab: when and were and who, they wanted to know. (Why came much later.)
Montross’ book takes on some of these issues. As reviewed by Harvard professor, poet and doctor Rafael Campo,
“Body of Work” is at its best when Montross, who is also a poet, allows us to observe the astonishing beauty her dissection reveals, and to relish the language she uses to describe it. “The language of these bones slides along their edges,” she writes. “Os coxae, the hip bones. Their three parts, with names like flowers: ilium, ischium, pubis…. The pelvic brim, as if water spills over it…. Brim, arch, spine. The ligament names like a call to prayer: sacrospinous, sacrotuberous. Sacrosanct.”
This wonder cabinet of anatomical language is familiar to any biologist. It is indeed beautiful. So is the body it describes. But Campo rebukes Montross for allowing such language to establish a clinical distance between herself and the life history of her assigned cadaver, “Eve:”
I believe it is the depersonalization first modeled for aspiring doctors in their encounters with cadavers that accounts for much of the lack of professionalism and career burnout in physicians, and the callous treatment patients too often receive nowadays.
Really: studying the body as beautiful, complex object is a precursor to treating living patients callously? I have never known anyone to leave an anatomy lab feeling less respect and wonder for human beings than before they began. Yet Campo wants the anatomical curriculum to explicitly address the spiritual, not just the physical:
In this age of frequently misapplied technology, here is a chance to make productive use of video cameras and monitors: Might not a video of Eve, telling of her life and created at the time she decided to donate her body, help mitigate some of the mistreatment Montross documents, as well as the subsequent distancing she (however uneasily) comes to approve?
A pleasant idea - and what I’d expect from the author of The Desire To Heal: A Doctor’s Education in Empathy, Identity, and Poetry. Empathy should be part of the training of doctors and nurses alike. But is anatomy lab the right venue in which to share the life history of a cadaver? Personal details would increase the discomfort of beginners - in my experience, overly powerful empathy for the deceased disrupts their ability to cut and handle the body (a point Campo seems to dismiss). Would cadavers without life stories receive less respect or care than those who had documented their lives?
Isn’t the point that regardless of our living identities, whether we are good or bad, our bodies are kin, after death and in life? When the cadaver was alive, it was home to a unique mind. Now that its cells are dead, is its role in the laboratory to elegize that mind - or to represent universal anatomical mechanisms? As a biologist, the answer seems fairly clear. Perhaps a doctor feels differently; I don’t know. But I was disappointed as Montross appears to conclude her book by backtracking from scientific objectivity to elegaic ritual (with Campo’s approval):
Great teacher,” she intones, “I give you flowers. I carry your body to the funeral pyre. When you burn, may every space in you that I have named flare and burst into light.” Thus she aligns herself with the humane tradition of honoring the dead, and the act of love inherent in tending to them. The detached concern she professes to want to emulate seems refreshingly absent here. Perhaps, in recognizing our universal and very human contradictions, there is hope for the beleaguered medical profession, after all.
Honestly, this leaves me cold. I can’t speak for anyone else, but if my body ever ends up in a cadaver lab, I don’t want people intoning poetry to it. I want them to dissect it. And yes, I said “it,” not “me.” I’ll be dead. My body is a wonderful clockwork, but it ain’t me.
The imagined ritual may be beautiful and humane, but it is a pleasant fiction, meant for the observer, not the observed. It has nothing to do with the cadaver’s living identity - we have no idea who “Eve” was, nor if she even desired commemoration. Most importantly, the manifest beauty of the human body doesn’t require validation by tradition or flowers (or words). We don’t have to turn a cadaver into a spiritual symbol to make it a wonder: it already is wonderful, even in death. And if someone fails to understand that, I doubt they should be practicing medicine at all.
July 8th, 2007 cicada
Angel, 2005
paper and glue in artist made frame
Peter Callesen
This beautifully written essay at Cabinet of Wonders, Mechanical Thinking and the Human Soul, includes some amazing sculptures by paper artist Peter Callesen. Callesen’s A4 papercut series are razored from a sheet of paper and assembled, still tethered umbilically to their mother sheet, yet folded and glued into a 3D shape that responds to the original 2D negative space they departed.
I recognized Callesen’s work from various blogs, especially the dying-poppies piece Alive but Dead and the thinking skeleton Looking Back. But until seeing the pieces juxtaposed with each other, I hadn’t realized what a wonderful sense of humor they have - superimposed on a sort of double spatial thinking that is really quite amazing.
Halfway through, (detail), 2006
paper and glue
Peter Callesen
His work reminds me of a favorite grade school pastime: writing multipage lists of cursor instructions intended to draw a castle, which I would later input into a primitive Apple, to discover if I had successfully kept track of all the angles in my head, or if the drawbridge would end up sticking sideways off the battlements. Either way, I was breathless to see what the code would give me.
Impenetrable castle, (detail), 2005
paper and glue
Peter Callesen
It’s almost, but not quite, correct to say the reward of coding cursor castles was half in the planning, half in the final payoff. The potential for the castle was in the code already - it hardly needed to be executed. Typing it into the computer was the boring part. Nevertheless, it was surprisingly pleasurable when the imagined form became tangible so my eyes could appreciate it along with the mind. Callesen’s works represent a similar intricate planning process, but instead of making the outcome merely an obligate test of a plan, he tweaks the 3D structures so they react against and defy their 2D shadow templates. Each one is something coming alive, changing unpredictably in the moment of transformation.
Birds trying to escape their drawing, (detail), 2005
paper and glue
Peter Callesen
June 29th, 2007 cicada
Illustrations for Antikamnia Chemical Company Calendars, 1900 & 1897
Louis Crucius, ~1890
BibliOdyssey turned up this wicked advertising campaign by turn-of-the-century pharmaglomerate Antikamnia Chemical Company. The calenders were targeted at medical professionals, not the average consumer, for whom I presume a baby skeleton in a christening gown would be a slight turn-off.
I like the little pharmoompa-loompas the best. I wish I’d had some in grad school. Or for grading exams. . .
By the way, this is exactly why illustrators need skulls as references. Crucius must have had access to a newborn’s skull as well: note the broad, thin mandible and the diamond-shaped fontanel (soft spot) on top of the head. It’s a fairly accurate drawing.
May 3rd, 2007 cicada
Mammoth skeleton sets auction record - Boston.com
On Monday, a rare Siberian mammoth skeleton sold for nearly half a million dollars at auction. The skeleton was inexplicably named “The President.”
A number of other curiosity-cabinet staples, like a bezoar, also sold, racking up a total of $1.5 million. The auction is a sign of increasing interest in natural history collectibles. Scientists complain such specimens shouldn’t be sold to private collectors, where they become inaccessible to researchers, but at these prices museums can’t compete. And as with early 20th century art, it seems provenance problems follow skyrocketing prices. A Russian official has challenged the origin of auctioned fossils.
PS. The first line of the Wikipedia article I linked for bezoar is perfectly indicative of the Wikipedia accessibility problem:
“A bezoar or enterolith is a sort of calculus or concretion, a stone found in the intestines of mostly ruminant animal.”
Oh, of course. I’m sure everyone gets it now. It’s something to do with math!
April 17th, 2007 cicada
Pleistocene Skeleton
Steel, wax, marble dust, and acrylic
Nancy Graves, 1970
Smithsonian Museum of American Art
Last fall I visited the newly renovated Smithsonian Museum of American Art. One of my favorite pieces was this sculpture by Nancy Graves. It’s made of steel, but coated and painted to resemble excavated bone.
It’s hard to explain why I singled this piece out - after all, it resembles any old skeleton in any number of natural history museums. But unlike the typical frenzied, kid-thronged dinosaur exhibit, the Graves sculpture was alone, at one end of a completely vacant gallery (except for myself and one of the Smithsonian’s many silent guards). It felt like I was discovering something for the first time. Yet it wasn’t authentic. It was neither “pleistocene” nor a “skeleton.” It had never been alive, and it wasn’t a history of anything, except the artist’s own imagination.
Pleistocene Skeleton
Steel, wax, marble dust, and acrylic
Nancy Graves, 1970
Smithsonian Museum of American Art
Apparently Graves’ contemporaries weren’t sure what to make of her work either. They knew she was good: in 1969, at the age of 28, she held a solo show at the Whitney (the first woman to do so). It consisted of three life-sized camels - built from the inside out, of acrylic, hair, wool, and paint over wood and steel armatures. According to the Time review,
More than a few museumgoers suspected that Nancy Graves’ camels were part of an ingenious put-on, particularly since the Whitney was handing out extraordinarily pretentious brochures in which Miss Graves was quoted as proclaiming that “these camels do not find their organization in the real world but are the result of my experience. I cannot imagine or perceive a camel until it is completed.” It sounded rather as though she were kidding the highbrows who insist that great art must be abstract. Since the abstract artist—by definition—depicts shapes for which no exact models exist in the visible world, he sometimes refers to his work as “not perceived until completed.”
Miss Graves, however, when approached directly, maintains that all she cares about is camels. “There’s as much possibility for fresh invention in making a camel as in making a human figure,” she says. Come to think of it, since nobody else has done much using the camel as a subject, there is probably more. (Time, “The Camel As Art,” 1969)
Camel VI, VII, VIII
wood, steel, burlap, polyurethane, animal skin, wax, oil paint
Nancy Graves, 1968-69
Graves worked continuously until her death in 1995, and her output was bewilderingly diverse. Prior to encountering “Pleistocene Skeleton,” I had never seen her earliest pieces. Her sculptures from the eighties look radically different - brightly colored abstract assemblages hardly reminiscent of natural history museums. So I was surprised to discover that one of her key influences was Clemente Susini, whose work she encountered at La Specola while on a Fulbright. (See my previous post on Susini here).
From an interview between Graves and Emily Wasserman:
The Museum of Natural History in Florence, Italy (where I lived and worked during 1966) contains the wax-works of an 18th-century anatomist, named Susini. What I saw there was a man whose total obsession was circumscribed within a very academic situation. That is, he was trying to define human anatomy in terms of drawings, and their reproduction in wax. The results were art, even in terms of that socio-historical period, although they were not recognized as such–they were not just copied cadavers. Visually, it’s the most emphatic thing–the attempt to be rigorous about whatever the problem was, was much more thorough and complete than most artists usually are…the significance of this for me was that Susini had produced a complex body of work from a single point of origin. (Artforum, 1970)
I love Graves’ description of Susini’s work. It reflects the central tension in scientific art (or art inspired by science) between accuracy and interpretation. Is it art or not? And why? “Pleistocene Skeleton” invokes that question, but doesn’t answer it.
Graves would continue to draw from natural history throughout her career. The fossil theme continues in her sculptures “Variability of Similar Forms,” “Fossils Incorrectly Placed,” and “Inside-Outside;” she would also create paintings based on geologic maps of the sea, moon, and Mars, and even her abstract sculptures included casts of natural materials. According to Michael Brenson, “while late American modernists were trying to build toward a future that would erase the past, Ms. Graves was involved in a wilder artistic project no less radical in its implications. She was re-creating evolution” (NYT, “Sculptures by Nancy Graves at the Brooklyn Museum,” 1987).
More on Nancy Graves:
Nancy Graves Foundation
National Gallery
Article at Answers.com
March 2nd, 2007 cicada
This essay has been reposted at the new bioephemera, Feb 19, 08.
Anatomical Teaching Model of a Pregnant Woman
Stephan Zick, 1639-1715
Wood and ivory
Kunstkammer Georg Laue is a Munich antique/art gallery informed by the sensibility of the “wonder cabinets” (kunst- or wunder-kammer) of 17th century Germany. One of the interesting objects described on the site is this ivory model of a pregnant woman with removable parts, including internal organs and a fetus.
Such dissection models may seem incongruous to modern eyes - the perfectly clean, white ivory cadaver not only has impeccably coiffed hair, a hinged arm allows her hand to rest delicately against her forehead as she reclines on a small lace-trimmed pillow! She’s clearly dead, with a little inlaid coffin for a case, but she’s more like a puzzle box than a body.
17th-18th century medical illustrations offered a variety of odd perspectives on the pregnant female form. A more clinical approach prevailed in Jan van Rymsdyk’s 18th-century illustrations for atlases by William Smellie and William Hunter. (Please be aware that if you’re not of a medical bent, you may find the illustrations below the fold unpleasant.)
Rymsdyk’s illustrations focus tightly on the gravid uterus, to the exclusion of nonessential anatomy; the cadaver’s thighs are not merely truncated, they are presented in sharply detailed cross-section, like joints of meat in a butcher’s stall.
Gravid uterus at full term
Engraving, after drawings by Jan van Rymsdyk
From The anatomy of the human gravid uterus exhibited in figures,
by William Hunter (1774)
It would be hard to arrange a more unsentimental view of the womb! Yet Rymsdyk’s glistening engravings are stylized in their own way - they’re hyperrealistic, impeccably clean, free of the gore that would obscure both dissection and birth. Rymsdyk’s motive is clarity rather than sentimentality, but his illustrations end up as starkly artificial as a bleached lace pillow.
In soft, semi-translucent colored wax, artists achieved more realistic results. Some of the best examples are Clemente Susini’s wax anatomical models, made between 1803 and 1805, which are documented in detail at the website of the University of Cagliari. The Cagliari collection includes two obstetrical models very similar to Rymsdyk’s engravings. (Wax models served as realistic, life-size teaching examples when pregnant cadavers were unavailable, and were still created as recently as the 1940s).
Susini also sculpted waxes more reminiscent of Zick’s style than Rymsdyk’s. His “Medical Venus” in the collection of La Specola at the University of Florence (Museo di storia naturale) represents a popular type of model displayed for the edification of 18th century audiences. Unlike the Cagliari models, or indeed other models in the La Specola collection, the most dramatic La Specola waxes depict entire nude bodies. The “dissection” is restricted to the trunk, which can be un-lidded to reveal removeable organs. Like Zick’s ivory doll, Susini’s attractive Venus reclines against a white cloth, her hair curled. When the “lid” is closed, a string of pearls even adorns her neck.
Reclining female figure (”Medical Venus”)
Clemente Susini, late 18th century
wax
La Specola, University of Florence
But unlike Zick’s ivory model, the Venus does not appear to be dead. Her eyes are open and her head is tilted in an attitude that has been variously described as drugged, ecstatic, resigned, or aroused. Other waxes at La Specola display similar expressions (see below). Although we find this apparent vivisection grotesque, the stuff of horror films, the 19th-century audience were probably more comfortable with such a surreal portrayal than they would have been with clinical realism. Reclining, drowsy nudes were common artistic subjects, and by giving his female nudes a classical, theatrical flourish, Susini may have been sidestepping the anxiety and taboos associated with dissection and violation of a corpse.
Reclining female figure
Clemente Susini, late 18th century
wax
La Specola, University of Florence
A ceramic torso by Manfredini also selects a surreal mode of presentation. Manfredini’s subject actually holds the folds of her own dissected abdomen open, as the layers of her dermis drape and mingle visually with the cloth of her robe. Her face gazes upward thoughtfully, and her attitude seems to be calm, solicitous desire to help the viewer examine her viscera (including uterus, intestines, and two very accurate oviducts). One can almost imagine her tilting her pelvis to afford a better angle to the onlooker!
Female bust with open abdomen
Giovan-Battista Manfredini, 1773-76
terra cotta
These examples are part of a long tradition of placing anatomical specimens in “normal” social contexts; skeletons and partially flayed men are frequently depicted walking, posing, and conversing in illustration and sculpture. But male specimens were usually exhaustively dissected, which had a dehumanizing effect. Susini’s skinless, hairless male waxes at La Specola do not appear nearly as “alive” to us as his females, who served to demonstrate the few organs unique to their gender, and remained otherwise attractive and whole.
18th century obstetrical models represent women simultaneously as ideals of graceful femininity and as puzzle boxes of removable parts. The modern viewer may well find them bizarre; the detailed portrayal of their hair and jewelry seems irrelevant, incongruous, or macabre, and the overtones of vivisection are disturbing. In the words of my anatomy students, Rymsdyk’s unsentimental approach to anatomy is “gross” (literally), but Susini’s Medical Venus is “twisted.” Annette Burfoot, in a thought-provoking article that conveys the experience of visiting La Specola, calls the collection “a visual feast of gore and the erotic” and argues that the waxes are the earliest “‘cinematic’ representations of the body as liminal subject between fear and rationality—key components of the horror genre.”
As a society, we become uneasy whenever medical knowledge is taken out of a sterile, dehumanized context. Two recent traveling shows, “Body Worlds” and “Bodies: The Exhibition,” which use actual, plastinated cadavers in a variety of poses, have been predictably plagued by controversy. Bodies:The Exhibition has special problems with the provenance of its Chinese cadavers, but both shows have been criticized for turning anatomy into theatre, or treating human bodies as artistic raw material, to be posed and composed for dramatic effect. Body Worlds reportedly makes a special effort to avoid offending visitors with its one obstetric exhibit (a third-trimester female who voluntarily donated her body for this purpose) by moving it away from the rest, behind a curtain. Entertainment, education, or exploitation? One thing’s certain: anatomy and art remain awkward partners.
Resources
Dissecting Pregnancy in 18th-Century England, Lyle Massey
Clemente Susini’s wax anatomical models at the University of Cagliari
A very real art, Fiona Mattatall
Anatomical Venuses: the aesthetics of anatomical modelling in 18th- and 19th-century Europe, AW Bates
Spectacular Bodies, Martin Kemp and Marina Wallace
January 5th, 2007 cicada
Still life: Photography by Guido Mocafico
Guido Mocafico has worked as a fashion photographer, but his interests range from landscape to still life to nature to architecture. His website is a true cabinet of curiosities, including collections of jellyfish, snakes, skulls, glaciers, ants crawling over diamond rings, and dead fish entwined with loops of pearls.
His book Medusa
(Amazon) has just been released and another book, Serpens
, is scheduled for release later in 2007.
Despite the obvious commercial context for his work, Mocafico clearly has a sense of humor about the industry; his 2001 series for the late mag The Face depicted fashionably dressed skeletons (actual skeletons, not starving models that resemble them).
January 1st, 2007 cicada
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