Museion concept, draft papers etc, art and biomed, museum and knowledge politics, museum studies
Why do museums want to bring art and science together?
Museums are a significant part of the global science learning and experience economy. There are many hundreds, maybe thousands, of science, technology and medical museums and science centers around the world. The Association of Science-Technology Centers presently lists 447 institutions, but they don’t list small, regional and local museums.
This STM-sector of the museum industry (let’s forget about science centers) spans everything from small, regional, amateur-driven collections and displays run by retired scientists, engineers and medical doctors to large professional-driven institutions supported by state grants and having hundreds of thousands, or even millions, of visitors each year—like the Science Museum in London, the Science Museum of Minnesota, and the Powerhouse Museum in Sydney, just to mention three big STM-museums on three different continents, who are among the significant actors in the global cultural and experience economy.
Whether they work on a small scale or as large operations, many STM-museums nowadays are involved in bringing art and science (art and technology, art and medicine) together. This is true both for the very small, queer and curiousities-filled ones, like my personal favourite, the Museum of Jurassic Technology in Culver City. It’s true for the middle-sized ones, like the Wellcome Collection in London which is deliberately exploring the art-life science connection. And it’s true for the Big Ones, like Cité des sciences et de l’industrie in Paris which has even published a guide to their own artworks.
Why then has art and aesthetics entered the STM-museum sector? In a number of posts over the next couple of days I will discuss five possible reasons why museums are increasingly bringing art and science together.
These posts are parts of a paper I gave at the session “Rethinking Representational Practices in Contemporary Art and Modern Life Sciences” organised by Ingeborg Reichle for the Society for Literature, Science and Art (SLSA) meeting in Berlin a couple of weeks ago under the title “Five (good and bad) reasons why a medical museum director wants to bring art and science together”.
The other speakers in the session were Suzanne Anker (New York) and Rob Zwijnenberg (Leiden). Above are Rob, Susanne and Ingeborg before we started the session.
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28 Jun 2008 Thomas
Thomas,
I share your curiosity about the surgence of art and medicine intersections. It is a very real phenomenon, that even we are drawn into.
On an interesting blog (http://www.bioephemera.com/ Feb 14 2008) Jessica Palmer wrote about the science/art connection:
“If you ask a biologist why he or she chose biology as a career, I’ll bet most will cite a deep feeling of wonder and appreciation for the beauty and complexity of the natural world. But that feeling is not so easy to find in the lab, where we try to be objective and logical (and efficient). How we can initially turn to biology for such emotional, unscientific reasons, and then neglect them afterward, is a puzzling thing. We may never have tried to formally articulate our wonder. We may enjoy the richness and motivation it brings to our work, without needing any articulation. Even so, since art is all about capturing inarticulate truths and inspiring wonder, art may have something practical to offer biologists - a way to recapture that original feeling of wonder and surprise that brought us here.”
Personally, I have had many intriguing dialogues with Joanna Ebenstein, who hosts Morbid Anatomy. She’s passionate about medical collections, as evidenced by her intriguing blogging.
Another artist who was drawn into the medical museum world is Laura Lindgren, who did the Mutter Museum calendars and subsequent books (see Blast Books: http://www.blastbooks.com/) You should engage her in this conversation. Not only would she have her own insights to offer, but also insights derived from working with other artists in a museum setting: laura@lindgrendesign.com
The Dittrick interaction with the art world stems from our proximity to the Cleveland Institute of Art, which has a department of Biomedical Art (read: medical illustration).
I will look forward to the response to your query
My best regards, as ever,
Jim
p.s. - my best to you and Anna!
Thanks for this, Jim. I’ll keep your words in mind when I shall rework the post series into an article, probably for Museum and Society. And I would of course appreciate your comments on what follows as well …
Now we’re going on a ten-day vacation to Anna’s aunt’s summer house in northern Skåne (between Örkelljunga and Hässleholm to be precise :-) and are leaving the protection of the Copenhagen house to our new and vigilant neighbours, Morten and Eva.
Having trained and worked as a Microbiologist, I can relate to the feelings of wonder and amazement of the natural world that then dissolve at the bench amongst the need for order and objectivity. While I am fascinated by science, I long left Micriobiology as a career and now work as an artist making my own work and teaching University students. Not surprisingly I make work about science as it is somehow embedded within me. Not only do I work with the forms and imagery of biology but also with the actions and procedures (including paperwork) that occur within laboratories. In a sense my work is a critique of my own experience of the scientific world. This notion of critique is pivotal as art has a long history of undertaking this important role in society whether it is through visual art, literature or film. Art allows us to create dialogues and to communicate ideas in many different ways. As researchers, artists are able to go even further and create new and hybrid knowledge. I think it is this synergy between art and science that makes it attractive to the museum.
Hi Fleur, thanks for pointing out the critical function of art. You are obviously right in principle — art as social and political criticism has played an immense role in the 20th century. I didn’t mention it in my somewhat cynical Berlin talk, however, because the critical function of art has, to my best understanding, played a rather insignificant role in the STM museum world so far. On the other side, some bio-art outside museums (Oron Catts, Steve Kurtz etc.) has a very strong critical function, and these art forms are now about to enter museums as well. So I guess I will have to incorporate this in the revised version of my article. Thanks for pushing me!