Biomedicine on Display

Yesterday the acclaimed director, stage designer, performer, writer, furniture designer and draftsman, Robert Wilson gave a presidential lecture at Stanford University. With equal parts performance, show and lecture Wilson told about his life and his art: ‘My theater is, in some ways, really closer to animal behavior. When a however stalks a bird his whole body is listening …. He’s not listening with his ears, with his head, it’s the whole body. The eyes are listening’. Wilson said that he tried to work with parallel universes in his art: the side scenes shall not illustrate the text, but speak their own ‘language’. Mime and movement shall not illustrate the lines, but form their own terms. How would an exhibition look like, if the objects did not merely illustrated the (textual based) points of the curators, but worked on their own? It would probably be a language of colors, forms, repetitions, weights, surfaces, lenghts, materials, qualities, etc. In the exhibition ‘Anna didn’t come home that night,’ which was shown at The Danish Museum of Art and Design in Copenhagen in 1996, Wilson himself gave an example of such kind of ’thing-language’. In one room for example some of the museum’s finest crystal glass were set up as menacing cones in a bowling alley. Their delicate frailty was so overwhelming that I had to stop myself from trying to rescue them. The crystal glasses were no longer just a beautiful sight. Their fragility crept into my body. Could our upcoming exhibitions on the biomedical world also reveal the plasticity of plastic, the weight of an MRI scanner or the perishableness of disposables? Is it possible to feel what it is?

One of the advantages of being a Visiting Scholar at Stanford University is the opportunity to get closer to another culture. Myriad of minor and major differences are emerging to the surface, in everyday rhetoric and actions. One interesting difference between American and Danish culture is, for example, the relationship to cosmetic surgery. The industry is growing rapidly worldwide, but where in Denmark it is still look upon with ambivalent feelings (it is something you prefer not to talk about), it has gained more favorably on the other side of the Atlantic. In the new American edition of Elle, you can read an Upper East Side New Yorker’s photo diary. We follow her every day, dressed in new incredible expensive clothes, on her cafe visits, in the Hamptons and on the Botox Clinic (!). That would not has happend in a Danish magazine. Beauty comes from within, not by a knife (and if it does we keep it for ourselves). On another page in the Elle magazine can be seen an advertisement for yet another rejuvenation miracle cream. A new wrinkle treatment promises fewer wrinkles.’It is not surgical results of course’ as it states - ‘hopefully not’ Danish women will think, but here it is obviously meant as a reservation à la ‘do not expect that kind of magic’. The question is whether this difference in the relationsship to cosmetic surgery will be maintained, or whether this is merely a matter of time before we come to love the needle as much as the Americans.

Last month I got the opportunity to visit the recognized Monterey Bay Aquarium on the West Coast of California. My family (husband, two kids, 7 and 10 and my niece, 17) spent an entire day learning and enjoying about the animal life in the sea. The variety of displays and activities were overwhelming, the size of the place and the amount of engaged employees could make any curator envious. But what really did the trick was the balustrade along the beachfront of the museum where you could overlook the ocean and watch the same animals you could get a close look at inside the museum, in wild life. Seals, sea otters and dolphins could easily be seen through the spy glasses on the balustrade. That makes me think about how much a museum is in dept to its place, especially if it knows how to use it as a part of its identity and brand. Art museums like Arken in Denmark and Guggenheim in Bilbao benefits enormously from their contrasting placement in traditional working-class areas, while a museum like Teknisk Museum in Helsingor in my opinion suffers from it odd placement in the suburb of an seaport, famous for it’s well-preserved renaissance houses. Although our preservation-worthy buildings in Bredgade can be a challenge, they offer a unique frame and a good story about the rise of modern medicine in Denmark. The question is of course how to use that story in our outreach activities without being hidebound by the past.

”BODIES - THE EXHIBITION” [sorry, BODIES - REVEALED, cf. comment below] has arrived in Copenhagen, with the ensuing marketing push and massive media attention. The exhibition, which shows plastinated bodies and body parts, opened on 18 April in the H.C. Andersen Castle in Tivoli where the usual wax figures have been switched with real dead Chinese bodies.

The exhibition is structured in a very pedagogic manner. First, the skeleton is introduced followed by the different parts and functions of the body in a systematic manner, ending with the different stages of foetal development (incidentally the most impressive specimen which, rather tellingly – more of this later – is not plastinated but immersed in liquid, floating with transparent fragility).

The exhibit is displayed very nicely, and the texts are short, explanatory and pedagogic. If you have never seen a plastinated specimen before you can expect a great experience from being confronted with the inside of the body and with the very convincing presence of the real stuff. But if you have seen Gunther von Hagens’ Body Worlds, expect a real sense of disappointment. This is in part because of the craftsmanship - or lack thereof. The bodies are not nearly as well plastinated, the body parts are oddly bleached and misshaped, and details of the incredibly fine networks in the body are lacking.

Technically and in terms of craftsmanship, BODIES is not on the level of Body Worlds, and if anything one gains a new respect for Gunther von Hagens and the skills of his Institute for Plastination. Aesthetically, BODIES is a relatively tame experience in comparison to Body Worlds. One of the really fascinating aspects of Body Worlds is the play between the sculptured bodies and their relationship to famous anatomical drawings from the Renaissance where the classical poses are used to display important aspects of the body’s anatomy. One example of these references to the Renaissance in Body Worlds is Juan Valverde de Amusco’s Anatomia del Corpo Humano from 1559, in which a figure is holding its own skin draped across its arm. It is beautiful, fascinating and a bit grotesque, and demonstrates superbly that the skin is the largest organ of the body.

Another sculpture in Body Worlds shows a flayed horseman on a rearing horse, together forming an impressive statue. The horseman holds in his one hand his own brain and in the other that of the horse, thus making clear why the horseman controls the horse and not the other way around. This union of artistic sensibility and anatomical knowledge is completely absent from BODIES since it does not use the body as an aesthetic expression. All the many complex layers present in Body Worlds are peeled away in BODIES, and only the soothing, pedagogical and didactic one is left – and it becomes boring rather quickly.

A final difference worth mentioning is the fact that the bodies in BODIES are Chinese, while the ones in Body Worlds for the most part are German. The very immediate mirroring effect for us (Northern Europeans) is broken when we are faced with the diminutive corpses. This is not BODIES’ problem, of course (and we shall refrain from mentioning the problem of the origins of the bodies – a matter that the media delve into every time the exhibition is shown in a new location), but it is our problem as ethnocentric spectators. The sense of identification is not nearly as strong.

The exhibitors expect around 450,000 visitors in Copenhagen. And most likely they will show up in large numbers since this is the first exhibition of its kind in Scandinavia. One can only mourn the fact that it was BODIES and not Body Worlds that visited our part of the hemisphere. We deserve better!

The practice of using one’s own self and material from one’s own life is probably the rule rather than the exception in the arts and art museums. It is quite different in cultural history museums which, in the name of generalisation, have always tried to collect and display ‘the other’ (in space and time), and eschewed the auteur.

But then again. You don’t need to have worked long as a curator in a cultural history museum to realise that surprisingly many artefacts seem to have connections with the life and deeds of their curators; for example many exhibitions contain objects that belonged to the curator’s friends, family members, colleagues — and even themselves.

And if you take a closer look at some museums you will see that not only their artefacts but the curators themselves appear in their own exhibitions. For example, one of the objects in the new ’Medicine Now‘ gallery at the Wellcome Collection in London is a tall book case

filled with analyses of DNA-profiles produced by a number of commercial companies for a growing market: you can buy pieces of jewellery with your own DNA-background, and so forth.

The DNA-analyses used in the book case are in fact made from one of the curators of the exhibition, Steve Cross. So what we actually see on the seven shelves is Steve Cross in a number of different varieties of self-exposure. He may have done this because he wanted to save time (it’s time-consuming to ask many people to deliver samples), or because he didn’t want to get into the ethical problems of using other peoples’ DNA — or because he actually wanted to use himself.

I must admit that I know the temptation. In the auxilliary exhibition ’100 Light Years‘ by Liv Carlé Mortensen which is part of the exhibition Oldetopia here at Medical Museion, see former post), I happen to be part of one of the 16 collage portraits of Danish 100-year olds, namely that of my own grandmother (we used her as an example when we sent out the announcement to find 100-year old Danish men and women to sit as models for Liv’s exhibition).

Liv did research for the collagee portraits the hard way — she visited all the 100-year olds to take photos of them and of objects in their home environment. The collages were then built up as composite pictures of the sitters together with selected objects. In the case of my grandmother, Liv happened to take photos of some family portraits than were hanging on the wall in my grandma’s bedroom – and one of these family portraits is myself at the age of 5. It appeared in the colleage by pure accident (Liv didn’t know it was me) — but I accepted it, and now I am part of the Oldetopia exhbition (it’s me in the small framed picture in the middle):

So, like Hitchcock appeared in his own movies, or David Lynch pops up in Twin Peaks, I have become part of one of the artefacts in the exhibition. I wonder if these two examples are coincidental — or if it is a tendency today to find new legitimate territories for self-referentiality. Just think of the blog phenomenon — composites of personal statements, private experiences, news and objective analysies. Is the blog culture creeping into exhibitions? Or is it the introduction of art in medical and cultural historical exhibitions that inspires to a more self-referential curatorial practice?

I’ve just seen Wellcome Collection’s wonderful new temporary exhibition Sleeping and Dreaming in their new house at 183 Euston Rd.

We sleep for about one third of our lives. No wonder therefore that sleeping and dreaming have provoked so much scientific curiosity and inspired so much imaginative creativity throughout the ages. 

Thus the Wellcome Collection introduces the exhibition made in cooperation with Deutsches Hygeine Museum in Dresden. The combination of huge collections and extensive research has resulted in an exhibition which impresses even an experienced museum visitor like me. I found myself staying in awe in front of all these fantastic objects and phenomena – scientific movies, measuring instruments, art works (and art videos), and sleeping (and keep-awake) drugs.

Among my personal favourites is the pictorial story of disc jockey Peter Tripp’s record setting struggle in 1959 to keep awake in the studio for 201(!) hours in a row, while his hallucinations, aggressions etc are clinically described.

Another favourite is a radio programme about a man who died from sleeplessness; and yet another one is the rendering of Miyashita Fumio’s sleep concerts in Japan in 1999, where busy people were stimulated to take a power nap.

The best feature in the exhibition, however, are the short scientific films from a German sleep laboratory in which we can follow people with severe sleep disorders — we see people who eat while they sleep and speak when sleep; we see a narcoleptic who suddenly falls asleep while he is sits fishing by a river; another falls a sleep in the middle of a conversation over a cup of coffee.

What about the artefacts? Well, they are absolutely fine, but generally speaking their function in the exhibition is to make concrete what is said about research into sleeping and dreaming. It’s the many films, photos and sound clips from the science and art worlds that dominate this dark exhibition universe.

So why is this exhibition so good?

1. It brings up a very existential topic which we all want to know something about because it is about ourselves and our being in the world.
2. The exhibition makes it clear, from the very start, that research into sleeping and dreaming has not come very far yet. The visitor is thus invited to participate in the inquiry instead of being presented with ready-made results only.
3. Medicine, biology, culture, history and art are mixed — because it’s relevant for the topic at hand, and because sleeping and dreaming are both about biology and culture.
4. The exhibition juxtaposes facts and fiction, because both have an impact on our understanding of sleeping and dreaming.

As a consequence Wellcome Collection utilises the exhibition medium as much as possible. Like no other medium, exhibitions can combine phenomena which do not normally belong together. It can simultaneously create impressions which are contradictory but nevertheless can stand side by side. And they are dealing with a topic which is better understood through an exhibition than by reading a book or surf the net.

This exhibition can be described — but is much better experienced directly. So, take a trip to London!  It is open until 9 March 2008. The catalogue is excellent too.

It seems like our unique position as the only Danish museum with a blog is coming to an end. The Organisation of Danish Museums has annonced a new blog which encourages museums to blog and digitize their research, communication and collections (they also use our blog as a succesful example, though).

This makes me think whether the change in science communication on the web (from presenting results = the classical website, to debating and process-oriented discussions = web 2.0) will one day come to the museum exhibition as well?

And what would a museum exhibition then look like? In our new temporary exhibition, Oldetopia, we have tried to let different phenomena and statements meet each other, so that it is up to visitors to draw their conclusions. But besides having a guest book, we do not try to integrate the visitors feedback directly into the exhibition.

The question is: How can we more seriously change the exhibitions, from a one-way-communication situation to a more dynamic arena? How would an exhibition as a blog look like? Suggestions and illustrating examples are wellcome.

Indtryk fra en studietur 18.-21. januar 2006
Studieturen gik til Berliner Medizinhistorischen Museum og til Deutschen Hygiene Museum i Dresden.
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Klemt inde mellem et bilværksted og en In-and-Out burger restaurant (”the best burger on the West Coast”) på Venice Boulevard i Culver City – en af de mindre flatterende af de mange byer som udgør ‘Greater Los Angeles’ – ligger The Museum of Jurassic Technology. På en gang mærkeligt, skræmmende og nuttet. Continue Reading »

4S-konferensen i Pasadena 20-23 oktober var et kæmpe gedemarked. 132 sessioner med tre til fem oplæg i hver, altså ca. 500 oplæg over tre dage. Vi nåede selvfølgelig kun en brøkdel af dem, men vi fik alligevel dannet os et nogenlunde overblik over STS-feltet. Continue Reading »

De kulturhistoriske museers faglige årsmøde bliver afholdt igen i år i Fuglsø, den 16. - 18. november. Mødet består dels af et officielt årsmøde, hvor foreningen vælger bestyrelse, aflægge årsberetning m.v. Dels er der møde i museumsinspekørernes forskellige faglige grupperinger, dvs. arkæologerne har deres halvdagssessioner, nyere tids inspektører deres, konservatorerne deres etc. Mødet er uden sammenligning det vigtigste for de kulturhistoriske museer. Deltagelsen favner bredt, og det er her, alle vigtige officielle og uofficielle informationer inden for de kulturhistoriske museer får rum til at cirkulere. Ion, Frank, Anders og jeg vil gerne deltage. Det fulde program kan ses under Organisationen Danske Museer, som afholder mødet; http://www.dkmuseer.dk/

Netværket holder møde i Hillerød 3. - 4. oktober 2005. Museologisk netværk er et netværk oprettet for snart en del år siden. Sigtet er at fremme museologien i Danmark. Continue Reading »