Post-Specimen Encounters Between Art, Science and Curating

Description

This edited collection explores a subject of great potential for both art historians and museologists – that of the nature of the specimen and how it might be reinterpreted. Through its cross-disciplinary contributions, written by a team of art historians, artists, poets, anthropologists, critics and curators, this book looks at how artistic encounters in museums, ranging from anatomy museums to contemporary cabinets of curiosity, can provoke new modes of thinking about art, science and curating.

Museological literature in the past focused on artefacts or objects; this is an original contribution to the field and offers new readings of old issues, inspiring new understandings of the relationships between art, science and curating.

Brings together international expertise from art practitioners, historians, creative writers and theorists in France, the United States, United Kingdom and New Zealand. Contributions from creative practitioners draw upon their own experience of producing artworks in response to specific scientific collections while historians, anthropologists, critics and writers examine how museums stimulate, incite and otherwise inspire artistic awareness of science and its specimens.

One of the most important contributions this book will make is drawing together several threads of research and practice to encourage interdisciplinary discussion.

It provides new ways of thinking about the relationships between art, science, museums and their objects. It concentrates on the ways in which scientific collections kindle novel aesthetic strategies and inspire new scholarly interpretations of art, science, curating and epistemology. In so doing it will make a considerable contribution to the fields of art writing, creative practice, art theory, the history of science and curating.

This book will appeal to academics, researchers, undergraduates and postgraduates studying fine art, curating, museology, art history, the history of science, creative writing; visual artists, curators, and other creative practitioners. Also of interest to museum audiences.  Reading list potential.

Introduction

Edward Juler and Alistair Robinson

1: Narratives of the ‘Fetish’

John Mack

2: Curating Interobjectively in Museums

Alistair Robinson

3: ‘A Readiness to Find What Surrounds Us Strange and Odd’: Objects in the Relational Curiosity Museum

Marion Endt-Jones

4: Art, Science and the Mutant Object

Rahma Khazam

5: Models of Subjectivity: Surrealism, Physics and Psychoanalysis

Gavin Parkinson

6: Glimpsed Phantoms of Sensation: Or, a Psychogeographical Investigation of Various Anatomical Specimens with Reference to Christine Borland’s Cet être-là, c’est à toi de le créer!

Edward Juler

7 … as far back as I will remember

Nadia Lichtig

8: Poetry and the Pathology Museum: A Model of Difference

Christy Ducker

9: The Scientist and the Magician

Irene Brown

10: Choosing, Unpicking and Connecting: On Drawing Museum Objects

Richard Talbot

11: Post-Specimens and Present Ancestors: Passing Fables and Comparative Readings at the Wildgoose Memorial Library

Jane Wildgoose

12: Moving beyond the Specimen (From Drawing Objects to Drawing Processes)

Gemma Anderson

13: Desiccation, Suspension, Extraction: The Inhuman Art of Christine Borland

Andrew Patrizio

Afterword: What’s at Stake?

Ludmilla Jordanova

Sujets

• Arts visuels
• Histoire des Arts
• Histoire des Arts
• Histoire des arts visuels
• ART
• History
• General
• Surrealism
• Installation art
• General officer
• Museology
• Material culture
• drawing
• Museum Studies

Informations

• Publié par: Intellect Books
• Date de parution: 08 octobre 2020
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781789383133
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 1 Mo

Extrait

Post-Specimen Encounters Between Art, Science and Curating

Post-Specimen Encounters Between Art, Science and Curating
Rethinking Art Practice and Objecthood through Scientific Collections
E DITED BY
Edward Juler & Alistair Robinson
First published in the UK in 2020 by
Intellect, The Mill, Parnall Road, Fishponds, Bristol, BS16 3JG, UK
First published in the USA in 2020 by
Intellect, The University of Chicago Press, 1427 E. 60th Street,
Chicago, IL 60637, USA
Copyright © 2020 Intellect Ltd
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without written permission.
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Cover designer: Aleksandra Szumlas
Cover image: Edward Juler, Vitrine, 2017. Photograph taken at the Anatomy Museum of the Faculty of Medicine/University of Montpellier.
Frontispiece image: Richard Talbot, Point, Line, Plane, Solid (2017). Pencil on paper. Detail.
Copy editor: Newgen KnowledgeWorks
Production manager: Mareike Wehner
Typesetting: Newgen KnowledgeWorks
Print ISBN 9781789383119
ePDF ISBN 9781789383126
ePub ISBN 9781789383133
Printed and bound by Gomer, UK.
To find out about all our publications, please visit www.intellectbooks.com
There you can subscribe to our e-newsletter, browse or download our current catalogue, and buy any titles that are in print.
This is a peer-reviewed publication.
Contents
Acknowledgements
Introduction
Edward Juler and Alistair Robinson
1 Narratives of the ‘Fetish’
John Mack
2 Curating Interobjectively in Museums
Alistair Robinson
3 ‘A Readiness to Find What Surrounds Us Strange and Odd’: Objects in the Alternative Curiosity Museum
Marion Endt-Jones
4 Art, Science and the Mutant Object
Rahma Khazam
5 Blind Summit/ Models of Subjectivity: Surrealism, Physics and Psychoanalysis
Gavin Parkinson
6 Glimpsed Phantoms of Sensation; Or, a Psychogeographical Investigation of Various Anatomical Specimens with Reference to Christine Borland’s Cet être-là, c’est à toi de le créer !
Edward Juler
7 ... as far back as I will remember
Nadia Lichtig
8 Poetry and the Pathology Museum: A Model of Difference
Christy Ducker
9 The Scientist and the Magician
Irene Brown
10 Choosing, Unpicking and Connecting: On Drawing Museum Objects
Richard Talbot
11 Post-Specimens and Present Ancestors: Passing Fables & Comparative Readings at The Wildgoose Memorial Library
Jane Wildgoose
12 Moving beyond the Specimen: From Drawing Objects to Drawing Processes
Gemma Anderson
13 Desiccation, Suspension, Extraction: The Inhuman Art of Christine Borland
Andrew Patrizio
Afterword: Specimen—What’s at Stake?
Ludmilla Jordanova
Biographies
Index
Acknowledgements
This book has been made possible through the support of a number of individuals and institutions who have, over the past three years, been willing to provide help, both financial and intellectual, to the project. The editors would particularly like to thank Newcastle University for its support, most especially in the form of a generous subvention which assisted with the overall costs of publication. Special thanks are due to Wolfgang Weileder who helped to secure vital funding for the project. The volume germinated from a two-day interdisciplinary conference hosted by the University of Montpellier in 2016 on the occasion of the exhibition, A Scientific Encounter: Inter-Objectivity. Since then, the University of Montpellier has been wonderfully accommodating to the needs of the project, helping to nurture it during its early stages and providing access to its collections whenever needed. Caroline Ducourau, Hélène Lorblanchet and Véronique Bourgade, in particular, have been tremendously kind in offering their time and expertise. The editors would also like to thank M. Phillipe Augé, President of the University of Montpellier, M. Michel Mondain, the Dean of the Faculty of Medicine at Montpellier, as well as Hélène Palouzié, of the Heritage Department of Occitanie. Katie Evans, formerly of Intellect, helped to steer the manuscript at an early point in its development; as has Mareike Wehner, whose guidance and support throughout the publication process has helped to considerably lessen editorial anxieties. Maria Kostoglou and Kate Sloan offered sagacious feedback on the manuscript in ways that positively informed the final shaping of the text. We would especially like to thank Ludmilla Jordanova for generously agreeing to write the afterword to this volume as well as Christine Borland for her enthusiastic support of the project. Edward Juler would like to thank family and friends for their love and patience, most especially Arielle Juler, Paul Juler, and Emily and Richard Moon. Alistair Robinson would like to give especial thanks to Elpida Hadzi-Vasileva, Daniel Brown, Keith Brown, Kelly Richardson, Bettina Dittlmann, Rosalind McLachlan, Murray Ballard; and to Caroline McDonald and the team at the Great North Museum, Newcastle-upon-Tyne.
Introduction
Edward Juler and Alistair Robinson
What or who is a specimen? By what means or powers of authority is an object rendered into a specimen, and as such a particular kind of ‘thing’? The term ‘specimen’ habitually carries connotations of scientific neutrality or objectivity, as though it were an overarching and timeless concept rather than a historical construct, characteristic of a distinctive idea of ‘modernity’. One might go so far as to say that the specimen itself is slippery, mercurial; less an example of objecthood disinterestedly beheld than the product of changeable praxes and shifting discursive regimes; a thing riven by taxonomy. Indeed, how can one begin defining an idea that not only spans disciplines but is peculiarly redolent of scientific practice? We suggest that a specimen might be understood, to borrow the term coined by Sherry Turkle, as an ‘evocative object’; an object which acts as a companion ‘to our emotional lives or as provocations to thought’. 1 Certainly, how could a specimen be anything but evocative, given its metaphorical embeddedness within scientific practice as exemplar, as evidence and as epistemological locus?
In its classification of the word, the Oxford English Dictionary lists two, now obsolete, definitions: ‘A means of discovering or finding out; an experiment’ and ‘a pattern or model’. Yet these empirical and indeed diagrammatic meanings resonate still within those more commonplace, contemporary definitions that provide the specimen with its scientific connotations and symbolic richness. It is both a

single thing selected or regarded as typical of its class; a part or piece of something taken as representative of the whole [as well as an] animal, plant, or mineral, a part or portion of some substance or organism, etc., serving as an example of the thing in question for purposes of investigation or scientific study. 2
In this sense, ‘the specimen’ constitutes the empiric bedrock of scientific enquiry; it can be, in its various guises: an investigative object, material evidence of a scientific theory as well as an epistemological paradigm. Above all, it is a particular way of knowing ; a means of ordering and making sense of the world through the objects that constitute it. 3
From the refrigerated human tissue sample to the crystal housed in the natural history museum, specimens might be understood to have an exemplary materiality , quite aside from any abstract values they may be seen to possess. For even if the object itself, such as a geometrical diagram, appears to the casual observer intangible or theoretical, its representation enjoys a ‘facture’: a material form over and above the object it describes (even if that form is but a single line drawn on paper or pixels flickering on a screen). Indeed, the epistemological weddedness of concept and material representation in science is perhaps nowhere better evinced than in the specimen itself, whose status as paradigm depends upon it embodying in some way the very properties it purports to illustrate. Thus, it is the ontology of the specimen which makes it an evocative object precisely because it represents a materiality wrought in the crucible of scientific thought, whose episteme is the product of a range of philosophical, cultural, ethical and sociopolitical concerns. 4
This volume is about specimens; or rather, it is about what happens to objects when they become ‘specimens’, which is to say when they enter a museum or other collections as items of classification and comparison. 5 It is also concerned with how specimens can be reimagined both by the academy and by visual artists. And it leads us to ask if art objects, too, may be properly seen as ‘specimens’, or indeed as post -specimens: things freed from the limits of curatorial narrative or the narrow constraints of historical time. In particular, the chapters that follow take that most paradigmatic of specimens—the object stored or displayed in the science and medical museum—and ask how creative practice, whether written or artistic, can interrogate its scientific thingness, its epistemic objectivity, its ideological valence. This volume approaches the relationship between museums, their specimens and collections, and visual art practice as a form of what the artist Mark Dion has termed ‘epistemological critique’. 6 In a broad sense, this type of critique might be seen to exhume and question those historical epistemic values that, over the centuries, have become embedded in the fabric of the science or natural history museum so that the ‘truth’ which such institutions attempt to convey about their specimens is revealed, in the words of Marion Endt-Jones, ‘as a constructed fiction, as a distinctly anthropocentric narrative influenced by a plethora of discourses, ideologies and interests’.