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On Thursday, i did a tour of Artissima, the contemporary art fair in Turin. One of the objectives of the fair this year was to be 'affordable'. "We are not interested in having artworks that costs 10 million euros. We want to enable young people and those who have a passion for art but a limited budget to become collectors," explained to La Stampa Andrea Bellini, the Director of the Turin art fair. I didn't ask for any price so i'll take his word for it. I did notice a fair amount of young and i must say rather exciting artists in the booths.
Well, that was a pretty inappropriate introduction because i'm actually going to focus on a photographer who gained fame in the '70s and '80s for her documentation of the internal war of the Mafia in Sicily at its bloodiest, and its devastating impact on the rest of the society. Just like Weegee and Enrique Metinides Letizia Battaglia was covering the cronaca nera, the crime stories for a newspaper. In her case, the left-wing L'Ora in Palermo.
In 1974, when mafia moved from organised crime to heroin trafficking, mafiosi became more brutal. They murdered anyone who would stand in the way of their business, from the chief of police to family rivals. By 1981, there was one killing every three day. Sometimes many more.
At the time, the Cosa Nostra was identifiable. It had faces one could photograph and associate with crimes. Today, mafia is much less visible. Battaglia's pictures, because of the corruption, silence, violence and suffering they laid bare, played a crucial role in the anti-mafia campaign. They show anti-mafia Judge Cesare Terranova shot in his car, corpses of mobsters abandoned by the road, tears of the wives and mothers when they discover the scene of the crime, arrests of a mafia boss, teenagers pretending to be though guys with attitude and guns.
Some of her photos were even used as evidence of corruption against Giulio Andreotti, a man whose authority in Italian politics was so powerful he was known as Divo Giulio, "divine Julius" an epithet of Julius Caesar. In 1993, when prosecutors in Palermo indicted the ex-prime minister, the police searched Battaglia's archives and discovered two 1979 photographs of Andreotti with an important Mafioso he had denied knowing. These pictures were the only physical evidence of the politician's connections to the Sicilian Mafia. Battaglia's life, after she retired from photography, is as awe-inspiring as her images: she's a photoreporter known for taking risks but also an editor and environmental writer and politician.
The Cardi Black Box gallery in Milan brought the work of Battaglia to Artissima, along with two other photographers of tragedy: Enrique Metinides and former Swiss police lieutenant Arnold Odermatt who during almost 50 years recorded car accidents.
Wikipedia has a list of webpages where you can find more photos of Battaglia. |
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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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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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I discovered this one yesterday during a talk that Oron Catts from Symbiotica was giving at the VASTAL (the VivoArts School for Transgenic Aesthetics Ltd) at the Waag Society in Amsterdam right before the tissue culture workshop he was heading together with Adam Zaretsky. The talk was entitled "An alternative timeline for regenerative medicine - A biased history." I'll come back to it later on this week. Here's the image:
It's a show of baby incubators at a freak show! Dr. Martin Couney, a pioneer in the care of prematurely born infants, showed baby incubators at fairs and freak shows in Europe and the U.S. His Infant Incubators was the most successful attraction at Coney Island, surpassing the appeal of bearded ladies, Siamese twins and sword swallowers. The admission fees subsidized the development and application of medical technology. The premature infants on display were being treated with equipment and techniques more sophisticated than those available at most hospitals; the survival rate of over 80% was unsurpassed at any medical facility in the world. Interest for the incubator 'oddity' dwindled when the New York State Hospital finally opened its incubator ward, and hospitals across the country followed suit.
Images from neonatology. Oups! Forgot to mention that there's only a few days left to apply for Symbiotica's residency program. Tomorrow, Saturday 19, don't miss the Sequence DNA by Chance Lab at Waag (i wrote down some info over here.) |
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Publishers Edizioni Corraini and Canadian Centre for Architecture describe the book as follows:From November 7th, 2007 to April 20th, 2008 the Canadian Centre for Architecture in Montreal hosts the exhibition "1973: Sorry, Out of Gas", curated by CCA Director Mirko Zardini and Giovanna Borasi. The exhibition examines the oil crisis of 1973 as a major precedent of contemporary concerns about energy resources and fossil fuel dependency. In fact, the 1973 shortage triggered research and development of renewable energy sources, improved technologies, and social experiments that were to have an enduring impact on the architectural and political fields both in America and Europe. The catalogue of the exhibition is co-published by the Canadian Centre for Architecture and Corraini Edizioni. Book design by Massimo Pitis. An illustrated tale by Harriet Russell, specially conceived on this occasion, introduces the book from a child's point of view. Her amusing drawings create ironic and funny situations in order to make children familiar with energy saving and oil dependency concerns.
I would have miss this brilliant and superbly documented book had i not received it as a present from the lovely people at For your Art during the Postopolis blogathon in Los Angeles last April. Sorry, Out of Gas is the catalog of an exhibition of the same title that ended in April 2008 at the Canadian Centre for Architecture in Montreal. I wish i'll get to visit CCA one day as they seem to regularly set up truly innovative exhibitions. Sorry, Out of Gas explored the architectural innovation spurred by the 1973 oil crisis, when Middle East producers declared a boycott and the value of oil increased exponentially and triggered economic, political, and social upheaval across the world.
Thirty years ago already, industrialized economies realized they might be relying too heavily on crude oil. Researchers, inventors, engineers, activist groups and architects came up with innovations and experiments aimed at preserving, renewing or creating new forms of energy. Today, it seems that much of their work (at the notable exception of Buckminster Fuller) and ideas have sunk into oblivion.
The book and exhibition attempt to remind us that the architects, designers and other 'luminaries' who are currently brandishing the magic word sustainability might want to acknowledge the pioneering work carried out more than 3 decades ago. As CCA Director and exhibition curator Mirko Zardini explained, "By providing insight on the forerunners of many contemporary approaches to sustainable living, the exhibition aims to increase public awareness and encourage contemporary research in the field." The book starts with "An Endangered Species", a lovely illustrated tale that explains to children our dependence on oil, the existence of alternative sources of energy and the little steps families can take to cut back on consumption.
Then comes an essay by Mirko Zardini and a chapter dedicated to oil, from the embargo to the games that were created at the time to educate or even sometimes dedramatize the issue. I was particularly fascinated by a series of discourses pronounced in the 70s by world leaders. They were much bolder and more undisguised than the ones voiced by today's politicians. It feels like our leaders prefer to tread much more carefully and are afraid of causing us any discomfort. The rest of the book is divided in chapters that correspond to alternative sources of energy and their use in architecture: Sun, Earth, Wind and Integrated Systems.
Times called for a new austerity, for a more sensible and DIY aesthetics. A few examples worth mentioning:
The Dover Sun House was the first solar home that was actually inhabited. Entirely heated by solar energy, it had been deliberately designed without back-up heating system. It was made by three women: sculptor Amelia Peabody commissioned its construction, Dr. Maria Telkes, an assistant in MIT's Department of Metallurgy, designed the house heating unit and architect Eleanor Raymond drew up the plans and supervised the construction. John Barnard's Ecology House is the outcome of the architect asking himself the question "How to make a house that resembles a park?" The answer came into the form of a construction sunk underground, with 25 to 40 cm of soil on the roof. Rooms receive natural light through the central open-air atrium shown below:
In 1976, a tenant-owner cooperative installed on the roof of their building at 519 East 11th Street in Manhattan solar collectors and a wind generator with the aim of using the energy for the public space inside the building. The system was connected to the Con Edison network, the company that had the monopoly for supplying power in the area. The energy generated was used in parallel with the supply from Con Ed. Over the first 5 months, the system met 110% of the overall demand.
Images from inside the book:
More photos from the exhibition on arttattler and designboom. Image on the homepage from Washington Post. Related stories: Radical Nature - Art and Architecture for a Changing Planet 1969-2009, The Golden Institute for Energy (follow-up coming soon), Ecological Strategies in Today's Art (part 1). |
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I'm not going to write down Agnes Meyer-Brandis's presentation at Biorama 2 as her talks are performances that i would only dumb down by trying to blog them. Instead, i'll just post this witty short video that documents the Moon Goose Experiment.
The artist set up a space expedition on a sand island in the Siberian river Ob and observed the effect of the total eclipse of the Sun (1st August, 2008) on the behaviour of the moon geese. Watch the space carriage take off! The Moon Goose Experiment (MGE) is based on an excerpt from a book which is often regarded as the first science fiction short story in English. In The Man in the Moone, Francis Godwin described weightlessness for the first time ever (1603) - long before Newton's theory of gravity. The protagonist in the book flies to the moon in a chariot towed by geese. These special moon geese migrate every year from the earth to the Moon.
The Moon Goose Experiment is a part of Curated Expedition by curatorial research group Capsula. Previously: Interview with Ulla Taipale from Capsula. |
