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In the 19th century, despite the best efforts of body snatchers, the demand from medical schools for fresh cadavers far outstripped the supply. One solution to this gruesome problem came in the form of lifelike wax models. These models often took the form of alluring female figures that could be stripped and split into different sections. Other models were more macabre, showing the body ravaged by 'social diseases' such as venereal disease, tuberculosis and alcohol and drug addiction.
You would never ever get me into a Gunther von Hagens show but if the Wellcome Collection puts together an exhibition of arty anatomical models and historical artefacts, surely i can go. Art, history... Does it mean it's not going to be shocking and sometimes gross? The answer to that question is a big 'no' but Exquisite Bodies nevertheless takes you on a fascinating ride, one that blends Victorian freak show, forgotten pages in medical history and crude lesson in anatomy and diseases. The artefacts were not only used in medical schools, some of them were exhibited for educational and entertaining purposes in museums around Europe. The last public museum of that kind in London, Dr. Kahn's Grand Anatomical Museum on Oxford Street, was smashed to pieces by the Metropolitan police a century ago. Suddenly that kind of information was deemed 'indecent and demoralising'. By the look on visitors faces today, it seems that the most sophisticately educated among us have not lost their appetite for the gore and the sinister.
A quick walk through the exhibition:
The most shocking anatomical models can be found in the second room of the exhibition. Just like heavy velvet curtains hide a series of graphic (i fear that id i write 'life-like', i'm going to put you all off sex for a month or two) human genitalia in extreme stages of disease modelled in flesh-coloured wax featuring real pubic hair, i'll conceal those images behind links. The book 'A survey of the microcosme; or, The anatomy of the bodies of man and woman' enables readers to peel off the body's layers and perform virtual 'dissections' by lifting the flaps to reveal internal organs. First published in 1619, it was the first anatomical atlas to make full use of this method of illustration.
A wrist with a 'cutaneous horn' growing from it. At the time some believed that the malformation may have been caused by exposure to the sun:
Around 1900, a waxworks museum was established by fairground entrepreneur Señor Roca in the heart of Barcelona's red-light district. The location was no accident, the collection targeted the local inhabitants with spectacular visual information about the contemporary 'plagues' with which they were all too well acquainted: tuberculosis, alcoholism and syphilis. Known as 'The Parade of Monsters', it originally contained a mechanical wizard, a 'house of murders' and a section devoted to human oddities alongside embryological and anatomical models and jars of human parts.
"Le Grand Musée de l'Homme", a popular attraction at fairgrounds in Brussels until the late 1950s, hid its pedagogical message among models of bearded lady, Cyclops and two-headed calf.
Exquisite Bodies is open until 18 October at the Wellcome Collection in London. More images at Morbid Anatomy and The Guardian. BBC has a lovely slideshow with audio comments. |
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If ever you happen to be in Patras (Greece) on Sunday, Oct 4th, for the International Film Festival don't miss the screening of the film Welcome to Hebron. If, like i guess most of the readers, you can't make it to Patras, you can also catch the film in Montpellier at the end of the month or in Stockholm and in Kassel in November. Two weeks ago Welcome to Hebron won a prize at the Cinefest Daazo Competition in Hungary. I saw it recently in London. The film was part of Goshka Macuga's exhibition The Nature of the Beast at the Whitechapel Art Gallery. You know how visitors typically spend a few minutes to watch videos in art exhibitions? This time, everyone was glued to their chair.
Filmed during more than three years on location in Hebron in the West Bank, Terje Carlsson's documentary shows the impact of the occupation on everyday life in Palestine.
At the center of the story, there's 17-year old Leila Sarsour, a student at the Al-Qurtuba-school, a Palestinian girl school surrounded by Israeli military installations and Israeli settlements (which are considered illegal under international law.) This peculiar location means that the school girls and their teachers are the ideal target for stone, garbage and egg-throwing. As a former commander of the Israel army, who has served 14 months in Hebron explains "When you see a Palestinian, you throw a rock." He adds that it's part of the education as children under twelve cannot be prosecuted. One of the most striking thing about Hebron is that it must have been such a lively, pleasant and pretty city. Nowadays, security nets are covering streets in order to protect Palestinians walking in the street from stones and other objects thrown down at them, other streets seem to belong to a ghost town, many businesses have closed, families have gone and those who have stayed have replaced windows by a tough metal web. Leila is never bitter, nor would she allow you to see her as a victim. Even if the walls of her city are covered with graffiti that say "Slaughter the Arabs" and "Gas the Arabs". Even if the soldiers put barbed wire in her mother's garden to prevent her from picking up the apricots and olives from her trees. Surrounded by check-points, fences, the gaze of Israeli soldiers and the constant threat of being attacked and insulted by settlers, she still believes it is possible to coexist peacefully in the city. Trailer of the movie: Terje Carlsson's upcoming movie sounds very promising. It will be called Israel vs Israel and will give a voice to the truly brave Israelis. |
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I discovered the work of Edward S. Curtis while i was visiting the Medicine Man exhibition at the Wellcome Collection in London. Curtis documented the American West as well as the rites and lives of Native American peoples.
Hop! Another picture because those Navaho sure knew how to make fantastic masks.
See more images at Curtis Collection, Flury and Co, Library of Congress, Old Picture, Bruce Kapson. |
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Medals are supposed to celebrate important figures or heroic deeds, but the stars of this exhibition are medals that condemn their subjects. The first part of the exhibition focuses on the Museum's collection of satirical and political medals from the 16th to the 20th centuries. The second part features medals that the British Art Medal Trust has commissioned from Jake and Dinos Chapman, William Kentridge, Grayson Perry, Ilya and Emilia Kabakov, Richard Hamilton, Mona Hatoum, Ellen Gallagher, Langlands and Bell, Cornelia Parker, Michael Landy, Yun-Fei Ji, Steve Bell and Felicity Powell. The most thought-provoking is the Olympic gold-style medal that Michael Landy created to honour English hooligan Dean Rowbotham "for breaking his ASBO on more than 20 occasions".
In 2006, leaflets were printed and delivered to homes in Hartlepool to make residents aware of an Anti-Social Behaviour Order (the ASBO was introduced in 1998 as a non-custudory punishment that stigmatizes individuals acting in an anti-social manner) obtained against Rowbotham who was 17-year-old at the time. Each leaflet featured the teenager's mugshot, set out the prohibitions in his ASBO and asked people to report any breaches to the Police.
By the time the young offender received his ASBO, this mark of shame and dishonour was regarded by some young people a sort of 'badge of honour.' Landy's medal reflects this trend. One side reproduces the face of Rowbothan, the other side features the offenses/glories listed on the leaflet distributed in the young offender's community. The brass is so shiny that you can see your own face reflected in it. And in a cultural economy of overinflated celebrity status, the notoriety of shame acquires a market currency all its own as shame morphs into resistance, appropriated by the marginalised as a badge of honour (via.) Medals of Dishonour runs until 27 September 2009 at the British Museum in London. |
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Simon Faithfull's exhibition Gravity Sucks and his recent talk at the British Film Institute focuses largely around his examination of that most elementary of forces we experience. What Wikipedia calls a "consequence of the curvature of spacetime which governs the motion of inertial objects" and what we call gravity. In what has come to be sometimes called Gravity Art, there is actually a couple of artists who have chosen to use it as their medium, often in somewhat beautiful yet futile actions, "heroic failures". Among these however, there's different directions of movement, namely down (submission) and up (escape).
The most relevant of the down-camp would probably be the late Dutch-Californian artist Bas Jan Ader whose body of work only contains a few pieces but who has significantly gained in importance as people have been re-discovering him over the last few years. Ader's gravity-related work focuses on the "The artist's body [and the way that] gravity makes itself its master" as he put it when his films Fall I (Los Angeles) and Fall II (Amsterdam) were being shown in Düsseldorf in 1971. He used the most basic elements - an omnipresent force and his own body. His work, however, as his friend Rene Daalder's documentary Here Is Always Somewhere Else convincingly shows, is seeded with references to his family history and his personal confusion that might have resulted from that and which peaked in his mysterious disappearance at sea during his final piece In Search of the Miraculous in 1975. In Fall 1 (Los Angeles) we see him on the roof of the house he and his wife were living in, sitting on a chair. Like in another performance, which refers to the night when Nazi soldiers forced his family out of their house in the Netherlands, a piece of the domestic environment becomes part of the performance. Ader leans over, loses balance, tumbles across the roof and crashes into the bushes in front of the porch while the chair comes to a halt still on the roof.
Chairs it seems, have a special significance in relation to Gravity Art, possibly because they are a device which in a way suspends us in mid-fall, in a pose we call sitting. They also represent a highly familiar artifact and thus create a link between the universal force of gravity and the utterly domestic. In the work of Simon Faithfull, who perfectly represents the opposite direction of movement, they play an even more obvious role as he explicitly uses them as a means for both him and the audience to project themselves into what he calls Escape Vehicles. He says the vehicles allow "[to] imagine occupancy of the seat while at the same time acknowledging that it is incapable of the pronouncement made within its title." He has built a series of them since the mid-1990s, the most recent being no.6 which was commissioned by Arts Catalyst in 2004.
This latest one, which the accompanying text to the exhibition at the BFI calls an "alarming" success, partly takes its inspiration from the famous flight of Lawnchair Larry. In the summer of 1982, because "a man can't just sit around", Walters attached a great number of weather balloons to a chair and - somewhat accidentally - shot off to an altitude of 11,000 feet and into the controlled airspace of LAX. (Don't miss the original NBC news coverage) Equipped with a pellet gun, sandwiches, beer and having dropped his glasses. His often-ridiculed trip could well be called the ultimate combination of the everyday and the heroic aspiration to "lose the shackles of gravity". In the case of Escape Vehicle no.6, the chair is empty, but the experiment is not any less successful, it rose to an altitude of 30 kilometers - the edge of space. The setup consisted of a weather balloon, and a jigsaw-like structure which had the chair on one side and a camera, a transmitter (built by an expert in ham video) and a GPS unit which submitted the vehicle's position using the video's audio track. One mainly sees the chair as it quickly gains altitude until the curvature of the Earth is clearly visible and the metal parts of the chair reflect brilliant sunlight. The temperature is -60º Celsius or lower and there is no air.
Faithfull says "the chilling nature of the film is that the empty chair invites the audience to imagine taking a journey to an uninhabitable realm where it is impossible to breathe". Suddenly the balloon bursts because of the low pressure which caused the air inside to vastly expand and everything attached starts a violent descent to the ground. The chair gets tangled up and bangs against parts of the structure, a leg comes off, then the backrest. A few minutes into the descent, the transmission ends and the chair of course was never recovered. According to the GPS data, somewhere over Kent, gravity won. Gravity Sucks, until September 20th at the British Film Institute South Bank Gallery, London SE1 8XT Related chair in space: Nelly Ben Hayoun's Soyouz Chair |
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The Radical Nature - Art and Architecture for a Changing Planet 1969-2009 exhibition, which is currently on at the Barbican Gallery (previously covered by Régine) also consists of several off-sites. They aim to engage with the city of London and make some of the themes of the show more palpable and real, if you want.
I went to visit the double piece which is located in London's North-East district of Dalston where both a re-staging of a work from the exhibition, Agnes Denes' Wheatfield, A Confrontation and a new commission, The Dalston Mill by Paris-based experimental architects EXYZT. The site itself is part of an abandoned railway line (the Dalston Junction Eastern Curve) and had recently been filled in with gravel to be used as a car park. Both pieces in fact form a temporary functional ensemble and eventually the mill will be processing grains from the field when the wheat is ready to be harvested.
The field is basically a re-creation of the Manhattan field from 1982, but it's much smaller and the backdrop is quite different, in that case an abandoned house and the Kingsland Shopping Centre, which is so absolutely puzzling in terms of style that it actually makes an intriguing and very London-like backdrop for the piece. The stark contrast between local production of food and the front-end of its industrialized production also makes for a nice update to the 'confrontation' side of the original piece. One could even say that it is being inverted in an interesting way as the 1982 version was partly about exporting the harvested grains to 28 cities worldwide and planting them there. Visitors are invited to sit by the field and, considering that it is jammed in between extremely busy streets and several construction sites, it feels like an island of peace in one of the madder areas of London. The mill itself was designed by EXYZT, a collective that many Londoners are familiar with through their Southwark Lido, a temporary structure they created in 2008 together with Sara Muzio for the Architecture Foundation and which was based around the idea of "a community of users actively creating and inhabiting their urban environment [as] key to generating a vibrant city". Sara is part of this project as well, creating a documentary about it and was working in the Mill's bakery when I got there. She explained that this project, although consisting of a very different setup, is built around the same ideas of the 'functional city'. Here, structures, apart from providing shelter, can also take on tasks like generating electricity or grinding wheat and provide a shared platform for the local residents.
The mill itself is 16 meters high and the main structure is built from a scaffolding typically used in construction. The six hemispherical sweeps at the top have been made from resin and are arranged in a hexagon. From there, a servo pole leads down to the bar area where it meets a small customized grain grinder which, whenever the wind moves the big structure above is making a few turns. Interestingly, there is also a series of gears which drives a small generator that is charging a battery which at night powers bars of LEDs in different corners to light up the building. It all moves very slowly and does neither generate a lot of flour nor energy, but it's fascinating to see how the attempt on creating a somewhat autonomous structure in the middle of a highly developed cityscape actually works and above all creates a very pleasant space around itself. However, to drive things like fridges and music, the mill has to have a secondary circuit which actually hooks into the mains because the wind does not generate enough power. It would be interesting to further look at how something like the Kingsland Shopping Centre and an ensemble of Mill and Wheatfield actually compare, as functional spaces and in relation to the absolute space they occupy in a city.
The Dalston Mill and the Wheatfield is unfortunately only up for three weeks in total and will close on August 6th, so make sure you go check it out if you are in London. It is open daily from 2-10pm, and there is a program of events scheduled (including a conversation with EXYZT about 'pirate architecture' on August 2nd) which mainly focuses on notions around community and sustainability. Entrance by the Peace Mural on Dalston Lane, between Ashwin Street and Hartwell Street, London E8. More photos. Related: Radical Nature - Art and Architecture for a Changing Planet 1969-2009 |
