Biomedicine on Display

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.

Relations between curators and museum management, between museums and their owners, and between museums and sponsors/donors come in all varieties. Sometimes they can be quite troubled—one of the best known cases is perhaps the censored Enola Gay exhibition at the National Air and Space Museum in the 1990s.

The Smithsonian apparently has a perennial problem. In an article in the Newsletter of the Organizaton of American Historians (nr 36, August 2008) titled ‘History with Boundaries: How Donors Shape Museum Exhibits’, the current president of the OAH, Pete Daniel, tells the sad story about how sponsors and donors together with the top management have curbed curatorial control over exhibitions in the National Museum of American History. The museum, says Daniel, “could dare to present exciting and controversial interpretations based on recent scholarship”, but instead it “has settled for donor-demanded exhibits, ignored recent scholarship, marginalized curators, and now strives for mediocrity”. Read more here.

(thanks to Jim Edmonson for the tip)

The registration is now open for the ‘University museums and community’ conference in Manchester, 16-20 September. The meeting is organised by ICOM’s International Committee on University Museums and Collections (UMAC) and the registration fee is reasonable low. So this is a good opportunity to meet others engaged in university museums. This year’s topic is important because our kind of museums have to find a way to balance on the one hand our identity as university museums with international research ambitions and on the other hand our identity as university museums that cater for local and regional community interests. Hopefully some of the presentations will address this problem. See program and other details here: http://www.meeting.co.uk/confercare/umac2008.

(thanks to Cornelia Weber)

How to handle human remains is a key issue for us and for other (medical) museums (see earlier post here, here, here and here). Last February, the Musée du Quai Branly in Paris organised a series of round-table discussions about the ethics of collecting and displaying human remains. Now the full text of the discussions have been published (in French and English) — see here.

(thanks to Haidy L. Geismar, Material World, for the tip)

For a decade, University Museums in Scotland (UMIS) have organized biennial conferences dealing with themes like cultural entitlement and museums (2006), the significance of collections (2004), the alleged ‘death of museums’ (2000), etc. (see all programmes here).

This year’s conference in Aberdeen (20-21 November 2008) will focus on ’The Contentious Museum’ because, say the organisers, ”museums have become increasingly contentious places”.

I couldn’t agree more. Museums are situated in a tumultous contemporary world with all sorts of new, potentially disruptive social, economic, religious and cultural conflict patterns, and many of these serious conflicts are pervasively permeating the museum world and the curatorial profession.

But these are apparently not the kind of contentious issues that the organizers think about. They rather want to engage with slavery, repatriation of objects, the treatment of human remains and so forth; they want to discuss “how responding to such challenges can enable museums to depart from tradition and embrace different ways of thinking, working and developing new audiences”. Thus the first conference day will focus on the display and curation of human remains and the legacy of empire and slavery (2007 was the bicentenary of the 1807 abolition of the slave trade); on the second day Galton and eugenics will be among the topics (see the program here)

I’m not questioning the importance of discussing different opinions about the place of human remains, repatriation, slavery and eugenics in museums. But not only are these throroughly discussed issues, museums today are also confronted with even more challenging social and cultural problems. A conference theme like ’The Contentious Museum’ would be better served to focus on some of these too.

For example, the large-scale processes of globalisation and marketisation have divided many museums into warring camps. There are ‘old-fashioned’ collection curators who behave as if museums were still national, research-based institutions for the preservation and solemn display of the cultural heritage for the educated classes and knowledge-hungry students. And there are ‘progressive’ managers and communication specialists who listen to the siren calls of the global ‘experience economy’ and try to turn museums into tourist traps to boost visitor statistics.

Another example is Science Museum’s counterpart to the 2006 Danish satricial Muhammad drawing incident, only in reverse. The museum decided to cancel a public meeting with James D. Watson last autumn because it was afraid that his racist remarks in The Sunday Times a few days earlier would alienate its audience (see earlier post here). Everyone agreed that Watson was a fool, but the decision to cancel the meeting was highly contested, also within the museum itself. Like the Danish Muhammad case, the Watson affair raised timely questions about free speech vs. cultural responsibility.

True, one or two talks in Aberdeen seem to bring up major contemporary contested issues. For example Clara Arokiasamy will speak about “Racial inequalities, multiculturalism, cultural diversity in Britain today: Are museums safe places for such discourses?” (see her and other abstracts here). But otherwise, there is not much in the program that indicates that this 6th biennial UMIS-conference will be remembered as a particularly controversial meeting.

Continuing the thread of thought in our art-science session at the SLSA meeting in Berlin in early June, I’ve just read David Edwards’s Artscience: creativity in the post-Google generation (Harvard University Press, 2008).

In Chapter 3 (“Idea translations in cultural institutions”), Edwards gives an interesting argument for bringing art into science and medical museums through the example of Wolf Peter Fehlhammer’s directorship of Deutsches Museum in Munich, the first and biggest science and technology museum in Germany, in 1993-2004.

As Edwards points out science museums and science centers have traditionally used art “to communicate the science message” in order to reverse the public skepticism of science. This was not Fehlhammer’s view of the art-science relation. Coming from a position as professor in chemistry at Freie Universität in Berlin “with a passion for the aesthetics of science” and with a belief that the future flourishing of science depends on “its ability to embrace the art of science”, he took another road when he was hired to head Deutsches Museum in 1993.

Fehlhammer wanted a science renaissance in the museum. In his own words, he wished to

reconcile people with the fascinating if challenging ‘Leonardo world’ [i.e., the world of contemporary science] around them. And, then, science might regain its former place, even reach new heights, and at the same time reestablish a social contract (p. 63).

This idea were realised in a number of events, including a Kunst-und-Wissenschaft programme, a laboratory for new electronic music, and several exhibitions. Fehlhammer’s favourite, says Edwards, was a performance art exhibit where artist Theda Radtke parodied a scientific lecture, showing how academic form takes over research substance. The art performance deconstructed the standardised rituals of science in order to remind the spectators about the original freshness, vulnerability, surprise and groping for truth that basically motivate most scientists to do science.

The idea was then not just to get art works as such into the Deutsche Museum. What concerned Fehlhammer, according to Edwards, was “how to engage artists to disrupt the way the public viewed science, how to empower artists within the museum … to challenge and disturb, to show the complexity of art and science and the dialog that must take place between the two” (p. 62). In other words, Fehlhammer wanted “to see art in the museum as provocateur” (pp. 59-60).
 
This is an interesting way of seeing the art-science relation in museums. In Fehlhammer’s vision, art should play the same role in science museums as it often does, or at least should do, in galleries and art museums, viz., to shatter our taken-for-granted views and understandings of the world. Accordingly, under Peter Fehlhammer’s directorship Deutsche Museum was partly turned into an art museum, and when the museum celebrated its 100th anniversary in 2003 “Fehlhammer received laudatory letters of congratulation from art museums all over the world” (p. 67).

(In a later post I will get back to David Edwards’s idea of a ‘laboratory’ for “experiment, action, and movement in and between the arts and sciences” which he is creating in Paris right now.)

At last, here’s my final post in the series of rationalities for bringing art and science together in science, technology and medical museums. This one also has to do with the issue of identity formation (see last post), but now among museum curators. Here’s the argument:

In the eyes of the general adult public, STM-museums are usually perceived as either nerdish, unsmart, dusty, serious (in the bad sense), etc.—or childish. In other words, our kind of museums either appeal to specialists with a deep interest in scientific instruments or, more commonly, to children, especially if we display dinosaurs, robots, human skeletons, and so forth.

In other words, our kind of museums have difficulties appealing to a generally educated, culturally interested audience between the age of 16 and 96. Grown-ups rarely visit STM-museums, unless they are specialists or are accompanying children.

The remedy for this is art. Art is smart, art is chic, art is sophisticated. Art draws an adult audience and thus helps raising the prestige of STM-museums—from being collections for afficionadoses or amusement parks disguised as museums, to becoming serious (in the good sense) and respected members of the museum world.

This, I believe, is the major reason why STM-museums will soon begin to compete among themselves for all the exciting wet-art that is being produced right now—from Oron Catts’ tissue cultures to Shawn Bailey and Jennifer Willett’s Bioteknica stuff. Recent exhibition successes like Jens Hauser’s Sk-interfaces in Liverpool is setting new milestones for museums.

—

Summing up, these five rationalities do not exclude each other. They can operate simultaneously, in different degrees, in different museums. And the list can probably be made much longer. I would be grateful for hearing some other suggestions and arguments for or against some of these I have mentioned here, before I deepen the argument, put the appropriate footnotes in and write the whole thing up for the jopurnal Museum and Society (and doing so, I will consult Paolo Palladino and Adrian Mckenzies’s thoughts on bioart, which I have deliberately stayed away from in order to sort out my own ideas first).

—

Finally, as I wrote last week, this and the preceeding six posts on “Why do museums want to bring art and science together?” 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) (see photo here).

And here is part of our audience a few minutes before we started the session:

In five earlier posts I have discussed why science, technology and medical museums are increasingly employing art in their exhibitions. The fourth reason in my list of ideal-typical rationalities for bringing art and science together goes like this:

If you believe in what some sociologists have recently called ‘biocitizenship’, i.e., the biomedical version of what European bureaucrats call ‘scientific citizenship’ – then, STM-museums are among the most crucial media institutions involved in the formation of such citizenship (cf. Elam and Bertilsson, 2004). This is the phenomenon of ‘governmediality’, to use Christoph Engemann’s term.

There is of course a strong discursive aspect to the formation of biocitizenship. In other words, it is partly through texts that individuals are socialized into the conceptual world of biomedicine and biotechnology and form their basic identity (like “I’m a cancer patient”, rather than “I’m Swedish”). But there is also a less discursive aspect, which is probably as important, or perhaps even more important. Ridley Scott’s movie ‘Blade Runner’ is a major piece of 1980s art which probably meant more for the formation of many people’s identity as potentially bio-engineered bodies than all textual media taken together.

Thus, the fourth rationale for incorporating art works in medical museums is that they know, consciously or unconsciously, that such museums are efficient tools for the formation of biocitizenship. In other words, as museums we are employing a strategy that will keep all the powerful stakeholders of ‘Empire’ (pace Michael Hardt and Tony Negri) happy – that is, we help translating the ‘multitude’ into biocitizens of the emerging transnational Empire.

[the next and last part of the series of “Why do medical museums want to bring art and science together” posts will follow tomorrow].

The third item on my list of ideal-typical reasons why museums want to bring art and science together is that art is a great cross-disciplinary integrator. The argument goes like this:

As culturally established factories for the production of meaning in the knowledge society, the humanities have a strong disciplinary function. In other words, our research practices tend to lie within the disciplinary boundaries of pre-established conceptual power-games (philosophy, sociology, political science, history etc.). Such games are keeping our universities orderly and are holding professors and students safely away from the scandal of real global problems. (I guess Slavoj Zizek could have said this.)

And here is where art comes in. Thinking about biomedical laboratories and practices in aesthetic terms can help us raise our awareness of seeing biomedical objects phenomenologically, seeing them outside pregiven disciplinary boundaries. Instead of explaining objects in terms of disciplinary conceptual structures and narratives, museums ask their audience to engage with the objects in a bottom-up process, thereby providing opportunities to formulate new questions about the biomedical world (cf. Daniel Miller’s book, The Comfort of Things, on this).
[the next post will be about art and scientific citizenship]

As I wrote in the last post, our co-operation with the Danish Museum of Art and Design in 2004 was the founding rationale for our pilgrimage into art, design and science. Then things went rapidly. In 2006 we engaged Canadian-British artist-curator Martha Fleming to help us organise a workshop on ‘Biomedicine and Aesthetics in a Museum Context’, followed by a public conference on ‘Art and Biomedicine: Beyond the Body’ hosted by the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Copenhagen.

We also began experimenting with different kinds of art exhibitions and installation, for example the street exhibition ‘The Face of Disease’, the photo collage exhibition ‘100 Light Years’, and the installation ‘Labyrinthitis’, a medical technology-inspired installation by Berlin-based sound artist Jacob Kirkegaard.

In this process, we were, in my ideal-typical reconstruction, entertaining another rationality for bringing art and science together, namely that art is a way of representing the new biomedical invisibles (see Martha’s article ‘The huge invisibles’). Medical museums have traditionally dealt with visible artefacts at a phenomenologically accessible macrolevel. The audience loves to see all these highly evocative objects: amputation saws, trepanations sets, pickled tumours, and so forth. But the armamentarium of contemporary biomedicine (HPLC columns, gene chips, etc.) are not particularly evocative, and the body they help researchers to represent is invisible (mainly protein interactions).

Hence another reason why art enters into the strategy of medical museums these days. Art is considered a way of bridging the everyday world and the invisible cellular and molecular domains.

This is what the annual Wellcome Image Awards are about: “the winning pictures”, they say, “show a wide variety of subjects, normally invisible to the naked eye, revealing new layers of complexity and making the ordinary extraordinary”. They probably mean making the extraordinary ordinary, though :-)
[the next post will be about art as a great cross-disciplinary integrator]

Why has art and aesthetics then entered the science, technology and medicine (STM) museum sector? This was not the case 15 or 20 years ago. What has happened in the last two decades?

I will not attempt to give any historical, sociological or political explanations for the flow of art and aesthetics into STM-museums; that’s a topic for a serious research project and even a book. Instead I will take on a more preliminary task: I will try to reconstruct a handfull of ideal-typical rationalities for why STM-museum curators around the world are engaged in bringing art and the biomedical sciences together.

I hasten to add that I haven’t done any fieldwork, or asked curators to fill in any questionaires. The reconstructions that follow in the next couple of posts are based primarily on websites and occasional discussions, and especially on my own experiences as the director of Medical Museion in Copenhagen.

Sizewise, Medical Museion is somewhere between the Jurassic midgets and the contemporary Power giants. We are placed in an old 18th century palace-looking building (the former Royal Academy of Surgeons) in the Copenhagen inner city area, with approx 4000 square meters of storage, exhibition and office space. Our biggest asset, besides the building, is a huge collection of medicotechnical artefacts, wet specimens and hard human remains — actually one of the biggest collections in northern Europe — ranging from 18th century medical curiosities to 20th century everyday medical care objects. We believe we have a total of around 200.000 objects plus another 60.000 images.

Like many other similar medium-size traditional medical history museums around the world, our museum was – until recently, when it was still called the Medical History Museum at the University of Copenhagen – content with taking care of and displaying the old treasures. Some medical history museums are in fact still quite satisfied with such a role; they are not interested in becoming engaged with the rapidly changing biomedical landscape, i.e, all these revolutionary things that are happening on the interface between postgenomic cell biology, pharma production, medical technology, biotech industry and computer science. It’s a messy world, so I think it’s perfectly legitimate (and probably even quite wise) to stay away from it.

But we decided to jump on the life science bandwagon, to engage with the hurly-burly of the contemporary life science world. So in the last four-five years we have turned both our research efforts, our acquisitions of new artefacts, and our temporary exhibitions towards investigating and displaying contemporary developments in the biomedical field. And a few years ago, a private Danish research foundation, the Novo Nordisk Foundation, decided that this approach was worthwhile supporting.

So now we are in the midst of a combined research and curatorial project called ‘Biomedicine on Display’. I say ‘combined’, because we seek to integrate research, the acquisitions of the material and visual culture of biomedicine, and the creation of exhibitions. And we do indeed have a great interest in bringing art, aesthetics and medicine together.

So in a sense, we are not just a medical history museum anymore, but a medical museum. That’s one of the reasons we changed our name to Medical Museion. So, which were our reasons for going into art and aesthetics?
[I’ll be back tomorrow or the day after tomorrow].

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.
[to be followed]

In the middle of April I attended the annual Museums and the Web conference, this year held in Montreal, Canada. It was 5 days of highly interesting sessions and I got back home loaded with information and inspiration that should hopefully be put into work in the near future.

One of the great things about such a conference is the opportunity to be presented with new excellent initiatives. A webpage I could hardly wait to tell my colleagues about is www.exhibitfiles.org. It’s a community site for exhibit designers and developers and seems to me to be a brilliant idea! 

The site was founded by the Association of Science-Technology Centers about a year ago. At present it has 723 members and seems to be growing fast. The site is user-generated and will thereby develop according to the members’ interests. The team behind the site wants to create a resource that collects information on exhibitions. You can enter what they call a case study of a particular exhibition or write an actual review of an exhibition. Of course there is also a blog where members can discuss whatever topic they like.

Camilla and I just signed up as members. What immediately caught our attention was a recent blog-discussion headlined “Unexhibitable?”. As we are currently making an exhibition proposal on obesity we are facing the problem. At first glance this topic seems easy enough to come around, but the more we think about it the more insecure we get. Can we actually make an exhibition that will be appealing and not offend people? Is obesity one of these unexhibitable topics? We have made our contribution to the discussion on the blog of exhibitfiles.org.

With a background in the history of 20th century life sciences, I didn’t know much about museums when I took this job. But I’m gradually learning the tricks of the trade and must admit that almost everything about museums is quite fascinating, especially acquisitioning becuse it’s so close to research.

I’m much more ignorant about the administrative and economic aspects. But there is one thing about the economics of museums that has caught my interest lately, namely the way museums are entangled in the experience economy.

For example, take the travelling exhibition ”Gregor Mendel: Planting the Seeds of Genetics” which was developed in 2005-2006 by the Field Museum in Chicago and which opens today on its fourth and last tour stop at the Academy of Natural Sciences in Philadelphia. Judged from the website this is a small and fairly conventional exhibit—it includes original notes, correspondences and a few artifacts from Mendel’s scientific work in the Brno abbey, they have also included some genetic art works, and a few interactives (”Try your hand at comparing the DNA of a flamingo with those of other birds to see how they’re related”), and so forth. Nice, but apparently not earth-shattering.

But the economic side is fascinating: in addition to the usual in-house operation costs, the Academy pays for transportation and insurance (which can easily be 25.000 USD or more). And on top of this, they pay for renting the exhibition, in this case 85.000 USD for 3 months.

So what’s in it for the Field Museum? Well, this particular exhibition has only been booked by four other museums, which means that they only earn a total of 340.000 USD by shipping it around the US (after having shown it to their own Chicago audience, of course). This probably equals what it cost them to develop the show in the first place, so “Gregor Mendel” is presumably a break-even.

But some of Field Museum’s other exhibitions are blockbusters. The dinosaur show “A T. rex named Sue”, developed in 1999-2000, has been to about 50 museums around the world (in two parallell copies; see tour overview here). They don’t tell the cost of renting it on the website. But if a Mendel exhibit costs 85.000 USD, you can imagine the prize of a dino show. Probably this returns a total income around 5-10 mill. USD for the Field Museum, well above their costs for developing it in the first place.

The icing on this particular dino show experience economy cake is that McDonald’s (yes, the hamburgers!) “works closely with each venue to create and support a strong local campaign of advertising, marketing, in-store promotions, and media relations to drive museum attendance” (quote from here).

Admittedly, as a state-employed historian of science/medicine I’ve so far been quite naïve about the larger economic aspects of museums of our kind. Okay, it’s one thing to join forces with a global hamburger chain to sell tickets to plastic casts of 70 mill. yr old dinosaur skeletons in local natural history museums all over the globe; and it’s another thing to co-operate with a national anaesthesiological society to make 50 year old resuscitating balloons engaging to an international anaesthesiological congress, as we are doing right now (see upcoming post in a few days). Apparently two very different museum worlds. Yet, we operate, in principle, on the same experience economical market place.

Food for thought, although I’m not quite sure where this is heading. Perhaps someone can help me to develop these thoughts further?

The other day I went to take a look at the Musée d’Historie de la Médecine, located on the second floor of the magnificent Université René Descartes (Paris 5) headquarter building in rue de l’École de Médecine.

I had expected yet another traditional, dull and didactical display of medical history, but got a pleasant surprise—a medical history museum in the disguise of an art gallery!

Compared to other European medical history collections, this one (founded in 1795 and moved to the present room in 1954) is not particularly big. But it is quite representative, especially on the surgical instrument side, covering the long range from ancient Egypt and classical Antiquity to the early 20th century. And there are several quite exquisite objects—e.g., a late 18th century wooden anatomical mannequin, a late 19th century carbolic acid desinfection chamber, one of Jean-Antonin Désormeaux’s pioneering endoscopes, Étienne-Jules Marey’s portable polygraph, and so on and so forth (some of the artefacts can be seen on the collection page; but don’t expect too much, because web presentation is not this museum’s strongest side :-).

The objects are neatly displayed in glass showcases along the walls and in a few decoratively placed transparent podiums on the floor.

There are no explanatory posters, wall texts or images that take the attention away from the artefacts themselves—just a few large oil portraits and busts of French medical doctors. And like in an art museum, the discrete small-sized labels just give the bare necessities (in French only, of course :-).

The impression of classic art gallery is enhanced by the huge room, lit from above by a diffuse natural light from the glass ceiling:

Why has this beautiful little museum escaped the wave of didacticism and contextualism that has swept over most of the European and North-American medical history museum world in the last three-four decades?

One reason may be that it is hidden away on a side-street in the Paris Latin Quarter; another that the owners seem to be totally unware of what is gong on in the Anglophone world. But there is also a more probable explanation: the present display is the oeuvre of an art curator, viz., the current head of the collection, Mme Marie-Véronique Clin-Meyer, who was trained at the Musée du Louvre in the 1970s and later directed the Maison Jeanne d’Arc in Orléans.

Whatever the reason—this is a great place which is worth a detour if you happen to be in Paris! Hopefully, the Université René Descartes is not entertaining the idea of ’modernizing’ this gem of a medical pre-20th century art gallery.