Biomedicine on Display

This session at the conference in September circled around the role of art in the museum, and how museums and artists can and should work together.

The first speaker, Karen Ingham, emphasized that the concept of art in museums essentially refers to interdisciplinary happenings and should always be a product of dialogue. She talked about how museum- and other spaces speak to us, and how the space can function as a creative catalyst and a link between museums and artists. Read Karen’s full abstract here.

Silvia Casini explained how her work with the aesthetics of magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) led her to undergo several scannings herself and how she in the end became an artist, video-maker, and curator in order to represent these very personal and yet elusive images. Read Silvia’s full abstract here.

The discussion afterwards focused on how art is incorporated into the museum. The question was raised whether, in the end, museum visitors will be able to tell a scientific object from a piece of art, and whether there has to be a difference. Comments were heard from Alex Tyrell, Lucy Lyons, Suzanne Anker, Thomas Söderqvist, John Durant and Victoria Höög.

See a list of the abstracts here. Read more about the EAMHMS video clip project here.

Rollator drawings, 30^th September – 4^th October 2010:

Continuing my appreciation of the aesthetics of seemingly ugly and mundane artefacts we associate with ageing, I investigated a second rollator.

This was a contemporary model. It had a clear plastic tray, a wire shopping basket and four wheels rather than three for extra stability. It was squatter, sturdier and in some ways even uglier than the earlier three wheel model. The hidden complexities and detailing within the design meant it took much longer to draw than I had anticipated.  I intentionally drew it from the position someone would see it if they were approaching it to use it.

The moulded plastic on the handles had been textured for extra grip and had an organic quality. The bolts and connections remained evident but were more refined.

What I found was how much I appreciated the qualities that I had previously missed. The curve of the front bumper and the connection on the front wheel shafts were particularly elegant and the sweep of the handles, handgrips and ergonomic brakes were much more aesthetically thought out than I had initially noticed. The light reflecting on the clear plastic tray formed bright curves and rainbow patterns in contrast to the opaque density of the black mat handles and shelf. The network formed by the basket was highly detailed and the intersecting areas had been welded neatly to form the grid of the shopping basket.

Interestingly, on the back of the rear metal legs were two orange rectangular strips of reflective material to ensure safety at night. The four wheels were not as fat as in the earlier model and the two at the back remained fixed whilst the two front wheels acted more like a shopping trolley.

Other things had not changed. The cuffs around the wheels remained the same, the mechanism for folding had not changed and the brake system appeared to be similar. The handles used to adjust the height of had become elongated and needed less effort to use.

Perhaps because these objects are so new, they are too close to us to be perceived as historical objects so have yet to become ‘artefacts’ i.e. something worthy of being presented within the auspices of a curated museum display where they would be expected to attract crowds who wish to engage with them. What would a member of the public hope to see when looking at an object such as this?

When objects are utilitarian, essential to many and in such common usage they can easily become invisible. The rollator is associated with assisting those who do not suffer from a terrible incurable disease but simply aids those who are just ageing as we all are, and need a little extra help. Is it because this is so uneventful, so usual we are not interested in looking at items associated with this natural process? Is it because the materials are thought of as utilitarian and not beautiful, or is it because we choose to turn away and not see something we find distasteful or fear but certainly do not welcome and embrace – the everyday process of ageing?

Rollator drawings  27^th–28^th, 28^th–29^th September 2010:

When I began drawing the rollator I asked myself why I was drawing something that was so boring, so ugly with no interesting features.

I was reminded of the talk Nurin Veis, Deputy Head Sciences – Science Communication and Senior Curator of Human Biology and Medicine at Museum Victoria, Australia, gave at the EAMHMS conference. In her talk about issues in displaying the cochlear implant, Nurin stated that the problem lies with our insistence in seeing the ‘black box’ item as ugly and not suitable as a museum artefact. Rather than trying to avoid it, rewrite it change or replace it with something explaining something about it, she asked why couldn’t we just accept it and learn to appreciate it? Maybe it is our job to see the aesthetic qualities of these ‘black box’ objects rather than try and avoid them.

The rollator’s use is essential to many, there is no doubt about that, but as an object, as a thing, it is so unappealing and uninteresting. It would not take long to draw such a simple plain thing.

Or so I thought. As I began I realized that the plastics had degenerated and the handles and wheels had an organic, sticky feeling to them. The way the brakes were attached to the wheels were far more complex than I had at first seen, but they were also connected by crude looking bolts. Mass produced steel rods had a feeling of hand madeness at the apex where they joined and the whole object took on a far more complicated nuance and styling than I had realized.

After 2 days, the amount of detail I had noticed changed my view of this object from boring and ugly to beautiful and fascinating. It’s complexities were hidden behind my prejudices and became seen clearly through my making the effort to spend time actually looking at this object and to stop making huge assumptions about it. How it worked, how it was made and the aesthetic of the object became more and more apparent during the two days I spent drawing it. Paying attention to such a modest and overlooked ungainly looking object showed it to be far more than I had at first perceived.

Overlooking such a vital yet seemingly unattractive object highlighted the need to spend time looking and building relationships with artefacts. The rollator has become, in my opinion a very beautiful object and reactions from others have been surprising also. Others have seen far more beauty in the drawing than they thought would ever be found in such an object. Maybe they will re-look at them and see them in a new way.

So many things associated with the ageing process are thought to be boring, ugly, utilitarian and uninteresting to look at. I am discovering for myself how wrong this assumption is. The toothless skull, so iconic of the image of ageing is fascinating and beautiful rather than ridiculous and unattractive.

Objects that help and assist the elderly, items used to test for ailments associated with ageing and objects used for treating them are all seen as having little aesthetic value as objects in their own right. And often the ageing population, the people themselves, are not regarded as being aesthetic so ingrained is it that beauty is connected with youth and newness.

Spending time looking at them, overcoming assumptions about them, elevating them from mere boring utilitarian thing to being experienced as unique, beautiful and fascinating encounters helps to re-see aspects of ageing in a much wider and more positive way.

On Thursday 2 December, a new Centre for Medical Science and Technology Studies at the University of Copenhagen is inaugurated with talks by Sarah Franklin and Ken Arnold.

Sarah Franklin will speak about “Life After the In Vitro Fertilisation: Biology Has Become a Technology?”. Sarah Franklin is well-known for his studies of in vitro fertilisation, cloning, embryo research and stem cell research. Her latest book is about the cloned sheep, Dolly. Since 2004 she has been a professor at the London School of Economics, where she has led the BIOS Centre together with Nicholas Rose.

Ken Arnold, who will speak about “Art and Communication of Medical Science”, is Head of Public Programmes at the Wellcome Trust, where, among others things, he has been responsible for the Trust’s collaborative projects between scientists and artists. He is primarily known as the initiator of and creative director of the Wellcome Collection, which is one of the world’s most successful arenas for biomedical science communication. In 2010-2013, Ken Arnold is visiting professor at Medical Museion, where he will contribute to the museum’s efforts to build an integrated research and public engagement programme for medical science and technology.

The Centre is a collaboration between Medical Museion and the Section for Health Services Research at the Faculty of Health Sciences’ Department of Public Health. The faculty of the new Centre includes Lene Koch (head of center), Thomas Söderqvist, Signild Vallgårda, Mette Nordahl Svendsen, Klaus Høyer, Jan Kyrre Berg Friis, Henriette Langstrup, Annegrete Juul and Adam Bencard. About ten postdoc’s and PhD students are currently attached to the Centre..

The Centre is co-operating closely with the new PhD-program for Medical Science and Technology Studies at the Faculty of Health Sciences, led by Thomas Söderqvist.

The opening takes place in Medical Museion’s Anatomical Theatre on Thursday 2 December at 3pm. After the talks there will be a wine and sandwich reception.

The challenge of how to display fetal bodies was attacked from very different angles at the September conference.

Morten Skydsgaard introduced us to the exhibition The incomplete child, in which the idea was to show the deviant body in its own right. He emphasized the importance, especially in controversial displays, of giving the visitors time and space for reflection afterwards. Read Morten’s full abstract here.

The next speaker, Sniff Andersen Nexø, talked about the meeting between research and exhibition making, as a desirable but not unproblematic way of curating an exhibition. She pointed out that it’s a great challenge to translate the theoretically informed academic research process into a display of physical objects and a minimum of words. Read Sniff’s full abstract here.

Suzanne Anker, the last speaker of the session, focused on the fetal body as a politically charged icon. We exercise power in the ways we choose to represent images of the fetus. The same object — a fetus — presented in different contexts and through different images sends very different messages. From thankfulness for diminished childbirth related death rates and cheers for scientific progress to calls for anti-abortion legislation and critiques of the psychological impact of prenatal diagnostics for handicapped people. Read Suzanne’s full abstract here.

In the discussion afterwards, the question of whether or not museums have any responsibility for the way their fetal specimens are represented elsewhere, was raised. There were comments from Thomas Schnalke, Karen Ingham, Thomas Söderqvist, Kim Sawchuk, Nurin Veis, James Edmonson, Wendy Atkinson and Nina Czegledy.

See a list of the abstracts here. Read more about the EAMHMS video clip project here.

Ugh! Last week I visited New York. What really spoke to my senses and touched my emotions in a provocative and morbid way was a toe-curling exhibition of works by the American artist Paul Thek (1933-1988) at the Whitney Museum of Modern Art. To be honest the works on display managed to freak me out a bit and that’s always a good indication of the effectiveness of an exhibition.

Even though I was quite disappointed about the architectural arrangement and the setting, which in general seemed a bit unfinished, I really enjoyed the display of works made by Thek. Especially the untitled pieces of meat from the series Technological Reliquaries made out of wax, hair, metal, wood, plaster, cord and paint presented in acrylic glass vitrines!

My first reaction: Ugh, dramatic and vulgar!

Secondly: Wow, it looks so real, although it’s not real at all!

And after that: What a delightful twisting of concepts! What a brave way of approaching the reversibility of meaning and expectation. This is real! This is more than real! Surely it’s the seduction of the hyperreal!

I think my personal fascination derives from experiencing the many different statements each item gives expression to. Each block of exposed meat, each cut of limb, hand, finger, foot, leg confused me and distracted my sense of order. Each and every one of the artworks seemed to present many conflicting layers of meaning. They have a charm that resembles Baudrillard’s conception of la seduction, and therefore they allow themselves to be grasped and described in his terms.

Baudrillard’s concept of seduction takes place on the reverse side of the logical linked terms of meaning. Through seduction mystery is raised by the blurring of every expectation and by combinations of opposite terms and relations. In the seduction, everything becomes obscure, and like a trompe l’oeil you become deluded.

Thek’s pieces of meat and his torn off limbs do not make a symbolic reading possible. There is no meaning and therefore nothing can be read. The neat surface of conceptual order is broken and we are faced with courageous juxtapositions of all kind. In some way – I would claim – the spectator is confronted with bodyparts more real than real. They are hyperreal, showing more of the fleshy matter than normally seen by the eye. This is the vulgar side of the exhibition, no doubt: blood, arteries, fatty lumps and the like are exposed right in ones face. Baudrillard would call this effect a growth of reality or a greediness of sight, which is in itself not seducing at all – very much the reverse! Yet we know that these pieces of meat are not the real thing. They are constructed. They are artefacts. They deprives reality of a dimension. They become ‘das Schein’: This is the mechanism of seduction. So, at the same time as one could say reality is exposed it is simultaneously obscured, veiled and covered up by the artificiality of the items exposed.

This seductive trick is executed on more than one level.

Continuing the theme the confusion of concepts of real and unreal is the question: Do the Plexiglas vitrines prevent the bad smell of rottening flesh? Well of course they do, at least my imagination tells me so. One of the pieces of meat has already been attacked by several of big fat flies. Yuk! My mind, my imagination of smell and my eyes tells me one thing: “it stinks!” on the other hand I’m aware that my senses could be playing tricks on me: These aren’t real flies and it isn’t real meat. Again I’m left in confusion, it doesn’t really make sense!

At many of Thek’s works a playful approach to several of our senses can be detected. Is it intended? Well, we will never find out for sure. Unfortunately Thek is long gone, but given his close friendship with and intellectual mentorship in Susan Sontag we might have a clue – at least we are allowed to make a guess. Sontag dedicated her famous collection of essays Against Interpretation to Peter Thek. I would like to round off with a quote from one of the essays titled the same:

”Like the fume of the automobile and of heavy industry which befoul the urban atmosphere, the effusion of interpretations of art today poisons our sensibilities. In a culture whose already classical dilemma is the hypertrophy of the intellect at the expense of energy and sensual capability, interpretation is the revenge of the intelllect upon art. Even more. It is the revenge of the intellect upon the world. To interpret is to impoverish, to deplete the world […]. What is important now is to recover our senses. We must learn to see more, to hear more, to feel more.” (Sontag 1966).

This exhibition of works by Thek seduces in a sophisticated way! It truly did mess up my concepts of reality in a fabulous way. It’s grotesque, rough, beautiful, adorable, painful and miserable. It’s unreal and highly artificial, but precisely because of the artificiality it manages to be so realistic and in touch with your feelings – mine at least!

Through the last six months I’ve been a regular visitor to the Medical Museion in Copenhagen. This house keeps collections of real flesh, skeletons, bodyparts with skin and all! Studying these objects of course has a strong impression on me as a spectator. Here I’m exposed to the real bodies, which once had a life. Yet I cannot imagine the smell of the real living flesh. It’s hard to get a grip on the realness of the real. It feels like there’s a big distance between me and the items observed. I ask myself why? Why is it easier to imagine the smell and the material consistency of the artificial flesh than the real flesh and bones? Maybe it’s because all the items on the Museion have to be understood in a different way. It’s like they almost require my empathy – or else I would be a bad and uninterested human being who didn’t care at all about lives once lived. I have to make use of my thoughts in a whole different way when confronted with the real flesh! It’s not that I don’t get seduced by exhibits of dead real bodyparts. I do, but in an entirely different way. It’s interesting how art compared to a more matter-of-fact science communication works. How might art and science communication work together? How might their synergism affect the museum visitor? These are questions which open a debate about the various forms of seduction we could expect at the museum – questions I will take up in the time to come…

At the conference “Contemporary medical science and technology as a challenge to museums” in Copenhagen last month, one of the very hot topics was art. What contributions can art make to exhibitions of contemporary medicine?

The first speaker of this session, Yin Chung Au from Taipei, pointed out that we should move away from displaying the frozen end product of medical science, and show objects in use instead. Visitors don’t get their experiences from being awed by the wondrous possibilities of contemporary science, but from personal experiences with the objects. MedArt can help us display the processes of medical science and allow people to engage with it. At the same time it can blur the boundaries of traditional medical ways of thinking, and expose scientific discourse as normative. When confronted with a MedArt wheelchair that helps you create your own melody when moving about in it, you are forced to ask yourself is being in wheelchair is really being disabled. Read Yin Chung Au’s abstract here.

Afterwards, Nina Czegledy addressed the challenge of exhibiting BioArt in medical museums. It requires high technology and maintenance, but on the other hand it provides us with an alternative way of looking at the mediated body of contemporary biomedicine. She made a point of the interesting aspects of contextualizing this contemporary anatomical art with anatomical illustrations from historical artists. Read Nina Czedgledy’s abstract here.

Lucy Lyons presented the idea that by using the ‘primitive’ technique of drawing, we can give visitors a chance to get close to the museum objects and appropriate them. When you give yourself time to really look at an object, you begin to see it. Lucy calls this “looking through a pencil”. In her experience, this gives you a much wider and more personal experience of the materiality, the history, and even the use of, an object than you would get from reading exhibition texts. It was an inspiring talk about experiencing other peoples’ experiences of object through drawing, and about the importance of giving visitors a material understanding of objects. Read Lucy Lyons’ abstract here.

The following discussion included comments from Danny Birchall, Jim Garretts, Adam Bencard, Nurin Veis and Kim Sawchuk.

For a list of all conference abstracts, see here. Read more about this video clip project here.

Luke Jerram has just finished a new glass sculpture of a Plasmodium falciparum merozoite just after it has entered a red blood cell.

The artwork is to be auctioned in New York to raise money for the charity Malaria No More.

See the sculpture in Jerram’s microbiology artworks collection and a YouTube clip of the newly completed sculpture.

(From the Luke Jerram Newsletter, October 2010)

This session at the conference “Contemporary medical science and technology as a challenge to museums” in Copenhagen last month circled around the concept of the Renaissance Wunderkammer, and how we might use techniques of curiosity and wonder to engage people with scientific and historical objects.

Joanna Ebenstein —who writes the blog Morbid Anatomy— talked about how we can use the feelings an object or a collection of objects evoke to make the museum visit a personal and interesting journey.

Joanna suggested we display artefacts in a way that appeal to the visitors’ curiosity. Better let people be inspired to investigate objects and their history for themselves, instead of presenting them with an educational fact sheet. Curiosity cabinets don’t tell straightforward stories, but activate the visitors.

In the discussion afterwards it was pointed out that the curiosity cabinet’s clustered and intimate atmosphere might be a challenge to modern museum aesthetics. There might also be a danger that it mystifies science. On the other hand the Wunderkammer aesthetic could be useful for museums who don’t wish to present answers as much as incite people to ask more questions.

The power of the Wunderkammer approach for presenting contemporary medicine was questioned. However, in Joanna’s view recent biomedicine is just as emotionally evocative as the objects of the original curiosity cabinets. Feelings of horror when confronted with the perspective of being able to clone living human beings, or wonder at the intricate microscopic chaos of the molecular microworld are also evoked by many kinds of contemporary objects, she suggested.

The discussion after Joanna’s presentation included comments from John Durant, Kim Sawchuk, Kristen Ehrenberger, Danny Birchall, Karen Ingham, Robert Bud, Robert Martensen, Claudia Stein and Ramunas Kondratas (see the end of the clip).

Read Joanna’s full abstract here.

For a list of all conference abstracts, see here. Read more about this video clip project here.

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The implication of the theme — ‘Contemporary medicine and technology as a challenge to museums’ — for this year’s biannual EAMHMS conference in Copenhagen last month is that it is difficult to exhibit the molecular level of the recent medical understanding of the body. How can we display such molecular and other tiny structures? And what metaphors and discourses do we use to describe a molecular understanding of the body?

The session “The molecular in the museum” discussed this problem. Jim Garretts, senior curator at the Thackray Museum in Leeds, suggested in his presentation that we work more closely together with researchers and research institutions, so as to allow the visitors to get an insight into practical medical science today. That way our abstract idea of things like the molecular is transformed into a more practice-based understanding of how the molecule functions in the body. Read Jim’s full abstract here.

After Jim’s presentation our own postdoc Adam Bencard put the idea of the molecular body into a larger philosophical perspective. He argued that there is a change in our understanding of the body, from a focus on genomics and the idea of life as text, towards proteomics and a focus on the materiality of being. This shift is interesting and profiting for museums because it puts the materiality of our exhibition objects, and the physical engagement with medical science that we provide, into focus. Read Adam’s full abstract here.

After these two presentations followed a lively discussion with contributions from, among others, John Durant, Danny Birchall, Suzanne Anker, Morten Skydsgaard, and Thomas Schnalke.

(Read more about the EAMHMS video clip project here).

I’ve totally forgotten to mention the fact that Danny Birchall, web editor at the Wellcome Collection in London, has written a very valuable and eminently readable personal resumé of the conference “Contemporary medical science and technology as a challenge to museums” in Copenhagen last month.

Thanks for the good work, Danny!

Cannot wait to see the new exhibition WeltWissen (World Knowledge) which opened yesterday at the Martin-Gropius-Bau in Berlin.

Organised by the Humboldt University, the Charité Hospital, the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of the Sciences and Humanities and the Max Planck Society, it is announced as the highlight of the Berlin Year of Science with more than 3,200 square meters exhibition space containing 1,500 original things, installations and media stations crossing time periods, institutional and disciplinary boundaries.

One of the highlights is yet another of Mark Dion’s typical installations that “highlights the system behind scientific activity as well as its fragmentary nature” — a 500 square metre shelf structure with objects Dion collected “while wandering through Berlin’s scientific storage rooms”.

See more here: www.weltwissen-berlin.de. Closes 9 January.

The covers of most major scientific journals are plastered with beautiful, realistic pictures taken with the latest advances in microscope technology. This month’s Nature Medicine is no exception.

Few of these images, however, have the qualities of David Goodsell’s works of art. Goodsell, who is based at the Scripps Research Institute in La Jolla, California, creates hyperrealist paintings that render the molecular world not as an abstract, diagrammatical space as we know it from biochemistry textbooks, but as a teeming, chaotic, dense and beautiful mess. They are simple, yet they portray the complexity and distinct organization of subcellular life in a way that no ‘real image’ can.

For example, Goodsell’s pseudocolor depiction of HIV — shown here in cross-section and incorporating all current information from structural biology and electron microscopy — gives a much-maligned pathogen a unique artistic quality.

Reminiscent of those of the Pre-Raphaelite painters, William Morris, and the Austrian symbolist Gustav Klimt, the hybrid ornamental-organic style of this and Goodsell’s other paintings give the molecular world a retro feel, bringing the cell and its contents closer to us and our lives. The challenge of putting biomedicine on display in museums and engaging the public at large is to make connections between the abstract visualizations of the molecular world and the lived existence of the postgenomic individual. It’s one of Goodsell’s great contributions that he offers a way to bridge this gulf.

Read more here (Nature Medicine, vol. 16, September, p. 943, 2010)

Immanuel Kant didn’t like metaphorical thinking in science — and his rebuke of this ambiguous way of investigating the natural world is one of the pillars for the modern separation of art and science.

However, in a statement article published yesterday in an issue about art and science in the German journal Gegenworte  (#23, 2010), art historian Ingeborg Reichle and cell biologist Frank Rösl suggest that the arts and humanities can inform a new approach to, for example, cancer research, “because not only artists but also scientists work with images, symbols and metaphors, draw on their intuition and make use of coincidence”:

System theory, non-linearity, dissipation and emergence are today research concepts with which one attempts to understand living cells as multi-layered adaptive networks as well as dynamically oscillating systems. The exceptionally varied nature of networks obliges us to think about how the world and nature shape themselves and which laws can be deduced from this. [...] It is possible to imagine the generation of new approaches to animated micro-biological processes through the construction of alternative scientific models, and also through the creation of new art forms. Because not only artists but also scientists work with images, symbols and metaphors, draw on their intuition and make use of coincidence.

(translation by Eurozine Review)

Today, Ken Arnold is starting his temporary appointment as Visiting Professor in Medical Science Communication and Museology at Medical Museion.

When he is not visiting Medical Museion, Ken Arnold heads the Public Programmes team at the Wellcome Trust, where his role is to creatively direct Wellcome Collection — a very successful public venue in London that seeks to explore the connections between medicine, art and life. It has received very positive press attention throughout the world, attracted over 300,000 visits per year since 2007, and has been nominated for the Museum of the Year and European Museum of the Year awards.

The Wellcome Collection has emerged as the culmination of 15 years of innovative public work at the Trust, where Ken Arnold has run a variety of arts and exhibitions activities, including a gallery at the Science Museum devoted to exploring medicine in context. He also co-ordinated the establishment of the Wellcome Trust’s arts funding initiatives, which support collaborative work between scientists and artists. He was also Chief Curator of the highly successful exhibition Medicine Man: the Forgotten Museum of Henry Wellcome shown at the British Museum in 2003.

Ken Arnold gained a B.A. in Natural Sciences at Cambridge University and a Ph.D. in the history of science from Princeton University, and worked in a variety of museums (national and local) on both sides of the Atlantic, before joining the Wellcome Trust in 1992. He regularly writes and lectures on the culture of museums past and present and on the contemporary relations between the arts and sciences.

Some of his articles in collected volumes are highly original contributions to the problem of how to use art in the presentation of medical science. Other articles have raised the problems of the relation between history of medicine and medical museums in new and fruitful ways. In the monograph Cabinets for the Curious: Looking Back at Early English Museums (2006), Arnold draws on the historical experiences of the classical 16^th and 17^th century curiosity cabinet as a resource for opening up a new field of discourse for contemporary museum innovation. The Collector’s Voice: Critical Readings in the Practice of Collecting (2000) raised new issues about the role of collecting in the history of museums. His academic activities also include supervision and examination of PhD-projects in science communication and museums studies at the University of Leicester, Leeds Metropolitan University, Oxford University and Open University.

We are very happy to get this opportunity for close encounters with Ken Arnold and thereby draw on his long experience in research-based exhibition making. If anyone wants to meet him during his Copenhagen sojourn, please contact him at k.arnold@wellcome.ac.uk.

(image credit: LabforCulture, www.labforculture.org)