Museum Lust

Poetry

Miniature Fantasies: Paolo Ventura

bioephemera — Wed, 17 Aug 2011 09:44:39 +0000

Miniature Fantasies: Paolo Ventura

L'Automaton #06, 2010
Paolo Ventura
(zoom view available here)

Artist-photographer Paolo Ventura constructs and photographs miniature, dreamlike scenes. His Winter Stories represent the reminisces of an old circus performer. Above, a scene from the Automaton series captures a mysterious, half-built android. Who is the android's creator? When and where is this happening? Ventura's work is evocative precisely because it is so mysterious. (It turns out that Ventura's backstory for the Automaton series involves a lonely watchmaker in the Jewish ghetto of 1942 Venice - but still, that hardly answers all the questions a viewer must have).

As regular readers of this blog know, I have a fondness/weakness for artists like Ventura, Randy Hages, Thomas Doyle, Lori Nix, who work in miniature, as well as for photographs using effects like tiltshift (make your own!) to create surreal, toylike scenes. (I attribute at least part of this attraction to my unconsummated childhood desire for a model train.) To me, miniature scenes are permeated by a subconscious awareness that the scene is "wrong" - the textures, proportions, etc. are not quite convincing. The closer they are to convincing, the closer they are to the uncanny valley of magical realism, and to evoking a dreamlike or half-remembered state. It's hardly surprising that Ventura compares the "invented time" in his Winter Stories to the work of Italo Calvino.

Unlike some miniature artists, Ventura works with modest materials:

he spends only a week to 10 days building the set, at an average cost of around $30. He uses foam board, cardboard, plastic, and wood -- basically, anything that he can get hold of. (source)

Here's a short video of Ventura in his studio, talking about his creative process. It's a remarkably simple process of building just as much of a facade or city street as he needs for the shot, taking a series of Polaroids to gauge lighting and angles, and finally photographing the effect he has envisioned with a simple fixed camera:

As Ventura explains in the video, he will often leverage the obvious artificiality of a painted mural or backdrop to persuade viewers that the rest of a scene is real. (Apparently he sometimes displays these elements in the gallery alongside the photographs, a presentation which Jean Dykstra describes as "a bit of evidence that grounded Ventura's fictional 'memories' in constructed reality.") Whether in the gallery or in the photo, the degree to which an element is convincing has a secondary effect on those elements surrounding it; it baits the viewer into suspending disbelief at a different level than she might otherwise do.

Works by Ventura and other miniature artists (including Lori Nix) are currently showing at the Museum of Arts and Design exhibition Otherwordly: Optical Delusions and Small Realities (though Sept. 18). MAD describes the collection as representing two principles in some tension: first, our increasing familiarity with and receptiveness to alternative, virtual realities, and second, the yearning experienced by residents of a largely computerized world to craft things and work with the hands. It's an interesting pairing of concepts, and the list of artists represented is truly impressive; this looks like a show well worth the trip. If you can't go, visit the exhibition site and use the web viewer to zoom in for intimate views of the amazingly detailed, convincing dioramas Ventura and his peers have assembled.

bioephemera Wed, 08/17/2011 - 05:44

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Perry's Arcana

bioephemera — Sat, 13 Aug 2011 07:44:21 +0000

Perry's Arcana

From 1810-11, architect and amateur naturalist George Perry published The Arcana, a lavishly illustrated, serial natural history magazine. Although Perry intended for the serial issues to be assembled by his subscribers into a book, only thirteen complete copies are known to survive today. More than a third of the known copies are in Australia - perhaps fittingly, as Perry was the first to publish an illustration of the koala (above).

Perry's work is not well known; in researching this post, all I could find online were auction listings and occasional references to a recent facsimile edition edited by Richard Petit. (Be prepared for sticker shock - it's not cheap). Harvard's Ernst Mayr Library has a copy of the facsimile, though, so I walked over yesterday morning to have a look.

Tragically, I discovered that I had to look at the facsimile in a sun-drenched room crammed with old natural history books, looking out over the grassy space in front of the Museum of Comparative Zoology. So sad!

The first thing that struck me about the Arcana facsimile is that it's quite thick, with very good paper. It's a facsimile, so I can't infer whether the original paper was equally substantial, but I think I'd been thinking "serial = cheap magazine," and this was definitely not that.

The second thing I noticed was the quality of the illustrations. They were hand colored hand-colored in the original; the effect is surprisingly delicate, and combined with the copious use of white space on the pages, very pleasing. This is definitely a book to leave lying casually open in your natural history themed sunroom:

To approximate the experience of flipping through it, check out this video of stills from the copy of the Arcana at the Academy of Natural Sciences in Philadelphia:

I have to confess that I wasn't tempted to actually read Perry's Arcana - only Petit's introduction, with its historical context. Perry's text was stereotypically flowery and dated. Interspersed with the shells, insects, and animals were passages from (other writers') travelogues to China, Australia, and other parts of the world, and I have never been a fan of 17th-19th century travelogues. Pretty as the artifact was, I knew basically nothing I'd read would be accurate.

Petit's introduction, though, was quite good (though shorter than I'd expected). Petit updates Perry's taxonomy and provides historical context, but leaves original errors and exaggerations in place. For example, Perry mixes the characteristics of the dolphin-fish (a fish) with the dolphin (a mammal). The errors and exaggerations aren't surprising; Perry was a self-taught naturalist (Collections manager Paul Callomon of Philadelphia's Academy of Natural Sciences calls him a "gentleman student" - quite a nice euphemism) who used local specimens and pets as models. The elephant pictured below, for example, resided in a British menagerie. Tragically, it became berserk as the result of an infected tusk and was put down with several hundred musketballs and a spear (information given in Petit's introduction).

Perry also apparently took a Lamarckian approach to taxonomy, which may have contributed to the neglect of his work. Callomon says Perry's peers portrayed him "as a dilettante who made things up, and who knew little about the higher organization of the natural world." Perhaps so - I certainly wouldn't use a copy of the Arcana as a scientific reference - but there is something rather awesome about a self-taught natural historian publishing his amateur vision of the natural world.

Perry really should have had a blog.

Sources:

Jeff Akst. "Perry's Arcana, 1810-1811." The Scientist, July 2010, p. 76.
Gary Presland. "Perry's Arcana" (Review). Historical Records of Australian Science, 2010, p. 117-18.
Perry's Arcana at Amazon.com

bioephemera Sat, 08/13/2011 - 03:44

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The show runs through July 31, 2011.

Rebuilding the past, virtually: The Buddhist Cave Temples of Xiangtangshan

bioephemera — Sun, 03 Jul 2011 18:34:50 +0000

Rebuilding the past, virtually: The Buddhist Cave Temples of Xiangtangshan

From the Smithsonian, a short video about using technology to virtually reassemble ancient art from fragments long carried away and dispersed:

Majestic sixth-century Chinese Buddhist sculpture is combined with 3-D imaging technology in this exploration of one of the most important groups of Buddhist devotional sites in early medieval China. Carved into the mountains of northern China, the Buddhist cave temples of Xiangtangshan were the crowning cultural achievement of the Northern Qi dynasty (550-77 CE). Once home to a magnificent array of sculptures--monumental Buddhas, divine attendant figures, and crouching monsters framed by floral motifs--the limestone caves were severely damaged in the first half of the twentieth century, when their contents were chiseled away and offered for sale on the international art market.

bioephemera Sun, 07/03/2011 - 14:34

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Web 2.0, New Media, and Gadgets

If the Founding Fathers wanted to visit Body Worlds. . .

bioephemera — Sun, 22 May 2011 19:47:07 +0000

If the Founding Fathers wanted to visit Body Worlds. . .

. . . they could have. Or pretty darn close, at least - they just needed to visit one of the many European cabinets of anatomical curiosities, to see the work of anatomists like Honore Fragonard.

Fragonard's eighteenth-century ecorches were the clear precursors to Gunther von Hagens' "Body Worlds" exhibits: preserved, injected, partially dissected bodies in lifelike, dramatic poses, with ragged strips of muscle draped like primitive clothing over exposed vessels and nerves. The effect is eerie - like a Vesalius illustration sprung to (half-)life:

Man with a Mandible

Several of Fragonard's surviving ecorches (including Man with a Mandible, above) are now housed in France's Musee Fragonard d'Alfort (below, with its armies of bleached, skeletal quadrupeds), and described in a new illustrated book by Musee Fragonard curator Christophe Degueurce.

To create an ecorche, Degueurce explains,

a body, chosen for its leanness, had its large superficial veins cut in several places to drain it of blood, and then it was washed and placed in a heated water bath to warm it in preparation for the injections into the heart and vessels. The substance injected was a mixture of resin, tallow, oil, and beeswax and was stained red for the arteries, blue for the veins. . . . Once the body had been injected, it was then dissected as rapidly as possible before decomposition set in.

The dried specimen was then washed in alcohol and allowed to dry out, with constant adjustments to maintain the final pose (which was often assisted with a wooden frame, needles, and blocks.

Fragonard's preservation techniques (which resembled those used by his contemporaries but are generally regarded as superior) are detailed in an appendix to Degueurce's very thorough book (see pp. 139-46). After drying his specimens, Fragonard retouched the paint and coated the final specimen with a costly resin-based varnish used on oil paintings (and possibly the paintings of Fragonard's cousin, the rococo painter). This treatment produced the shiny, lacquered appearance characteristic of the Musee's specimens, and - in Degueurce's estimation - protected the specimens from the insect damage that claimed many other pieces over the centuries.

Human Bust

In addition to cataloguing and describing the handful of surviving ecorches at the Musee Fragonard, Degueurce seeks to provide some context for their creation. Fragonard doesn't spring to life as a fully realized personality, but one does get the impression of a man dedicated to a larger vision. Fragonard rose to prominence at a new veterinary school, which was founded in 1766 at Alfort, outside Paris. (The Musee Fragonard is now housed there.) At Alfort, Fragonard and his colleagues built a renowned cabinet of curiosities that included specimens like the wild-eyed "Man With a Mandible" (at the top of the post), the "Horseman," a rider and horse fully preserved mid-stride, and the graceful "Doe of the Indies" below:

Nilgai/Doe of the Indies

Fragonard was well-known and popular, but eventually, conflicts with the veterinary school's founder led to Fragonard's dismissal, and he began producing specimens for private collections. In 1792, Fragonard made the case for a national anatomy museum in a report addressed to the National Assembly, volunteering to supply the specimens himself. Fragonard wrote, "except for a few small 'cabinets of curiosities,' all Mr. Fragonard's handiwork and privately owned, we have nothing, absolutely nothing in France to shed light on the wonders of [anatomy], which, despite so much hard work, has not much progressed."

Although the museum never materialized, Fragonard helped inventory extant anatomical collections for preservation - including the three thousand specimens in the veterinary school collection he helped create. In 1795, Fragonard took a position as director of anatomical research at the Paris School of Health. He passed away in 1799, his dream of a national anatomical museum unrealized, and many of the specimens he curated and created were transferred away from Alfort and/or lost.

Le nouveau parfait marechal ou la connaissance generale et universelle
Francois de Garsault, 1755

Degueurce seems regretful that while Fragonard and his peers helped catalyze a monumental shift in how we view our bodies - "man and animal inexorably came closer together" through the comparative anatomists' work - Fragonard's successors largely forgot him (perhaps partly through the efforts of his jealous ex-boss). Many of Fragonard's lost ecorches, Degueurce suggests, "suffered the common fate of old scientific objects: outdated, lacking relevance to current interests, such things are often disposed of." In a collaborative concluding essay written with Laure Cadot, Degueurce juxtaposes Fragonard's ecorches with von Hagens' plastinates, observing how public displays of anatomy fell out of popularity, only to recently rise again:

Despite a popular interest undiminished for more than a hundred years, the turn of the twentieth century nevertheless saw a progressive decline in these anatomical collections, as much on the technical level as on that of the moral, and with a disapproving eye some came to be viewed as inappropriate excesses in displays of morbid pathologies and monstrosities. The advent of increasingly realistic and accurate medical imaging and the revulsion with which flesh was regarded in the wake of the atrocities of the First World War gave the coup du grace to what had become an almost obsessive building of such collections. They began, little by little, to fall into the shadows, leaving the anatomists to pursue their investigations away from the uninitiated. . . In recent years there has been a renewed interest in the history of anatomy, and the development of worldwide shows such as Professor Gunther von Hagens' Body worlds exhibition, and his many imitators, once again puts the unhallowed figure of the ecorche at the fore of today's news. Is this merely a current fad resulting from the whiff of scandal or is it symptomatic of the corpse's resistance to the dematerialization of our era?

Degueurce's attitude toward the plastinate-driven resurgence is ambivalent. In one view, the faddish fascination with bodies indicates that human society has become unfamiliar with death, distant from it, in a way that makes death a "spectacle" of "morbid fascination." Questions about the legitimacy and propriety of plastinate exhibitions have spilled over to affect historical, scholarly collections like the Musee Fragonard's - questions that Degueurce, as curator, likely has to answer fairly often.

On the other hand, Degueurce clearly sees Fragonard as a pivotal symbol of the Age of Enlightenment, and his ecorches as works of great emotional and artistic significance:

[even] if intended by its creator as nothing more than a model demonstrating anatomy - a "beautiful specimen," as Fragonard noted - Man with a Mandible has validity as an artistic creation in its success as an anatomical model, in its refined, virtuosic execution, and in the powerful emotion it expresses.

Thus, Degueurce argues, it is not necessary to resolve whether Fragonard intended his ecorches to be works of "art," as well as works of science: "even if in our century science no longer considers the ecorches to be more than rather disturbing remnants of the long march toward human knowledge, the tracks of which must be carefully preserved, artists see in them dynamic and fertile aesthetic and conceptual associations." Though modern science has forgotten Fragonard and prefers bloodless virtual atlases to his varnished tableaux, artists and historians of science still find the ecorches evocative - as do we.

When I first started blogging, I was surprised that there was very little information on the internet about medical illustration, wax moulage, anatomical museums, etc. When I wrote posts like Wombs, Waxes and Wonder Cabinets or Invading Hands, Sleeping Beauties, I had to dig for content. That's not the case anymore; the fascination of vintage medical paraphernalia has gone mainstream, as shown by shows like the Discovery Channel's Oddities. Nevertheless, it's still hard to find good virtual tours of places like the Musee Fragonard. You can occasionally find tourists' photos on Flickr (these photos by Nicholas Borenstein are good) or an old documentary like this one on YouTube, which gives you a sense of how eerie Fragonard's work really is. Given the lack of resources on Fragonard's ecorches, Degueurce's book is a very helpful addition - especially the discussion of the techniques used by the master anatomist. I've seen Fragonard's injection technique described as "lost" or "mysterious" before; I've never seen it explained at the level Degueurce does. If you are interested in the process, you should seriously consider getting this book.

On the other hand, I was disappointed in one respect: the photos of the ecorches weren't as sharp, detailed, or clear as I had hoped. The isolated specimens floating on their black fields reminded me a little of stills from a 1980s film souvenir book - like 1/12th scale models from a nascent Guillermo del Toro - Jim Henson horror collaboration about zombies invading a natural history museum (wow - that sounds awesome, doesn't it?). Some of that could have been remedied by better photography; I wish the specimens had been taken off the velvety blackfield and more carefully lit, to eliminate the glare of varnish. But on some level, Fragonard's ecorches just aren't detailed enough to yield the crisp, well-lit eye candy we expect from a plastinate specimen or a modern medical atlas.

This is hardly a criticism of Fragonard. I learned from a wonderful, surreal conversation I once had with a curator at the Hunterian Museum that we have today lost many preservation techniques known to past anatomists - they really were innovators and artisans. However, what we've lost in the nuances of chemical preservation, we've largely made up in digital photography, MRI, cellular imaging, etc: today, we expect detail and scientific accuracy that Fragonard's posed, painted ecorches, like oil paintings or sculptures, simply don't deliver. Even next to the plethora of vintage medical illustrations, engravings and paintings Degueurce provides as historical context, the ecorches themselves look dulled and hazy with age. That patina is part of what makes them remarkable, but it's also . . . frustrating.

In the end, this book about Fragonard and his specimens is not meant to teach anatomy or physiology, any more than Fragonard's specimens are themselves today used for such a purpose. Rather, the book is a window into how we approached anatomy in the past, juxtaposing history with today's experiences of mortality and the body. That Fragonard is obscure, while his cousin, the painter of The Swing, gets almost all the Google hits (and the tourists, with a few rare exceptions) says something about our conception of Western culture. That Gunther von Hagens' plastination exhibits are popular, yet controversial, spectacles (and have led some critics to ask, "is it possible to stage an exhibit such as BODY WORLDS while respecting human dignity?") indicates that we retain a disquieted fascination with the human body. Are Fragonard's ecorches really that different from von Hagens' plastinates? It's hard to say, apart from the patina of history and mystery that clings to Fragonard's work - but does any piece in Body Worlds have quite the same spark of madness to it as Man with a Mandible?

Fragonard Museum: The Ecorches: recommended, especially for fans of curiosity cabinets, medical museums, Oddities, etc. (you know who you are!)

Human Bust

Credits:

All ecorches by Honore Fragonard, from the collection of the Musee Fragonard; images reproduced courtesy of Blast Books, from Fragonard Museum: The Ecorches.

bioephemera Sun, 05/22/2011 - 15:47

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Photography

Science in Culture & Policy

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Yikes!

A confluence of influences

bioephemera — Thu, 19 May 2011 15:57:26 +0000

A confluence of influences

minouette of magpie & whiskeyjack has posted an interesting meditation on the resemblances between Katie Scott's whimsical faux-botanical/biological atlas pages (above), the illustrations of Ernst Haeckel (whose portrait minouette just finished), and the Codex Seraphinianous. It's a harmonious grouping of artistic influences - check it out.

bioephemera Thu, 05/19/2011 - 11:57

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Fold-out vintage medical books

bioephemera — Wed, 18 May 2011 11:29:39 +0000

Fold-out vintage medical books

Animated Anatomies, a new show at the Perkins Library at Duke University, explores the tradition of fold-out or pop-up paper anatomical diagrams:

Animated Anatomies explores the visually stunning and technically complex genre of printed texts and illustrations known as anatomical flap books. These publications invite the viewer to participate in virtual autopsies, through the process of unfolding their movable leaves, simulating the act of human dissection. This exhibit traces the flap book genre beginning with early examples from the sixteenth century, to the colorful "golden age" of complex flaps of the nineteenth century, and finally to the common children's pop-up anatomy books of today.

I have a mid-century anatomy pamphlet by Hammond that is a very basic latter-day interpretation of these "flap books":

Flip books can be especially effective for visual learners, and anatomy is a highly visual subject. However, something is lost when the pages aren't transparent; it's hard to envision how the systems interweave when you have to flip back and forth constantly. (It also invites the obvious question - why isn't there a good anatomical iPad app that melds the vintage page-based flip book experience with fading in and out - the way Google's Body Browser does?) Anyway, this video clip shows the very non-high-tech flip books in action. My favorite is the disembodied foldout eye book seen at the end:

Via Laughing Squid (thanks to a heads up from Jennifer Ouellette).

bioephemera Wed, 05/18/2011 - 07:29

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Science in Culture & Policy

Science

Savage beauty: Alexander McQueen's anatomical inspirations

bioephemera — Sun, 15 May 2011 21:03:06 +0000

Savage beauty: Alexander McQueen's anatomical inspirations

Alienation often accounts for a macabre sense of the marvellous. At the entrance to "Savage Beauty," there is an evening gown conjured entirely from razor-clam shells. Antelope horns sprout from the shoulders of a pony-skin jacket, and vulture skulls serve as epaulettes on a leather dress. There are angel wings made out of balsa wood, and worms encased in a bodice of molded plastic. "I'm inspired by a feather," McQueen said of all the duck, turkey, ostrich, and gull plumage in his clothing--"its graphics, its weightlessness, and its engineering."

--Judith Thurman
"Dressed to Thrill," a review of the Alexander McQueen retrospective, "Savage Beauty," at the Metropolitan Museum of Art
The New Yorker, May 16, 2011

Selected objects from the exhibition: spine corset, impala horn jacket, black duck feather dress, antler and lace headpiece, razor clam dress.

bioephemera Sun, 05/15/2011 - 17:03

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Postmortem sleeping beauties

bioephemera — Thu, 12 May 2011 11:55:17 +0000

Postmortem sleeping beauties

Through the end of May, UMBC's Albin O Kuhn gallery is hosting a large exhibition of postmortem daguerreotypes, death masks, coffin plates, etc. from the collection of Dr. Stanley Burns.

Medical ephemera always have an emotional valence, because they represent patients who suffered, struggled and eventually lost their physical battles. But this collection of memorials are about the survivors' needs, not the dead, and are thus particularly eerie and wrenching.

From the curator:

Trace the evolution of postmortem photography through 19th-century daguerreotypes and prints from Sleeping Beauty book series as well as contemporary images by Todd Hochberg. The Burns Archive will be displaying examples of postmortem photographs, antique coffin plates, death announcements, mourning pins and other funerary ephemera. With over 300 linear feet of paper images and 6 cases containing ambrotypes, tintypes, daguerreotypes- it is the largest postmortem photography exhibit to date.

For as much as people of the 21st century avoid the subjects of death and postmortem photography, those of the 19th century embraced it. The living were depicted with their deceased loved ones with whom they were often not portrayed previously. The personal nature of postmortem imagery frequently makes it difficult for us to view memorial images from the past much less from our own time. This exhibition will survey memorial photography from the 19th through 21st centuries and show how the artistic efforts of the photographers contributed to the emotional qualities of the images. The imagery connects us across the generations to those who would have died unnoticed had they not been given by photographic means a kind of immortality.

The show runs through May 31, 2011, at the Albin O. Kuhn Library & Gallery, UMBC, 1000 Hilltop Circle, Baltimore, MD 21250.

More:

The Burns Archive blog (lots of vintage medical images)
The Albin O Kuhn gallery
Selected images from the Burns Archive's Sleeping Beauty books. (The first two books are very expensive secondhand, although you may be able to get them directly from the Burns Archive. A few copies of the third are available through Amazon: Sleeping Beauty III: Memorial Photography: The Children)

bioephemera Thu, 05/12/2011 - 07:55

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ephemera

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