Spirit Collection: Hippocrates

1999

Christine Borland

Christine Borland

Fruitmarket Gallery, Edinburgh

2 Dec 2006 – 28 January 2007

Bullet Proof Breath. 2001

Glass. Spider silk. Plexiglass vitrine.

Painted steel pedestal.

Contemporary collaboration

• The Arts Catalyst

• CAiiA-STAR, now known as The Planetary Collegium

• The Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation

• The Laboratory, Ruskin School of Drawing and Fine Art, Oxford

• The National Endowment for Science, Technology and the Arts (NESTA)

• The Wellcome Trust

The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution. C.P. Snow. 1959

I felt I was moving among two groups – comparable in

intelligence, identical in race, not grossly different in social origin, earning about the same incomes,

who had almost ceased to communicate at all

Complexity. Paul Greenhalgh. 2002

The gap between the arts and sciences grew so wide during the

20th century, the age of subject specialisation, that the scientists and artists understood each other

principally through caricature

The evils of the 20th century resided not in the whims of men like Hitler and

Stalin but in “rational cognitive thinking”, “depersonalised objectivity” and “the cult of objectivity”…..Science is impersonal, inhuman (it) kills God

Arthur I Miller, quoting Vaclave Havel. 1992-4

Christine Borland. The Dead Teach the Living. 1997

The Sculpture Project. Anatomy Institute. Munster University

A critique of reason:

the ordering of knowledge, nature & mankind

Christine Borland. The Aether Sea. 1999

Science is meaningless, because it gives no answer to

our question, the only important question for us, What shall we

do and how shall we live?

Leo Tolstoy.

Thomas Kuhn - The Structure of Scientific Revolutions - 1962

A paradigm shift‘Discovery commences with awareness of

anomaly, with the recognition that nature has somehow violated the paradigm induced expectations …exploration.. closes only

when the paradigm…has been adjusted so that the anomalous has become the

expected… until the scientist has learned to see nature in a different way

Michel Foucault - The Order of Things. An archaeology of the

human sciences - 1966• Historians see the emergence …of an

opposition between those who believe in the immobility of nature – above all Linnaeus – and those who…Bonnet.. Diderot… already have a presentiment of life’s creative powers, of its exhaustible power of transformation…

• 2004 edition, p.138

‘Historians want to write histories of biology in the 18th century, but they do not realise that biology did not

exist then…All that existed was living beings,

which were viewed through a grid of knowledge constituted by natural

history’

Foucault. 2004 edition. p139

Michel Foucault. 1966. (2004 edition. P140)

• 16th C; History was the inextricable and completely unitary fabric of of all that was visible of things ..to write the history of a plant or an animal was as much a matter of …its elements or organs….the virtues that it was thought to possess… the legends and stories…. its place in heraldry…. the medicaments that were concocted…..the foods it provided….what the ancients recorded of it…what travellers might have said

• 18th C; the great unflawed table of species, genera and classes……nature is posited only through the grid of denominations and – though without such names it would remain mute and invisible – it glimmers far off beyond them

A natural order, an unnatural divide

Studies of vessel of the thorax, heart and blood vessels. Compared with the

seed of a plant.

Leonard da Vinci. 1501

Muscle man seen from front with rhinoceros

Charles Grignion. 1747

Wax anatomical figure. Ercole Lelli or Anna Morandi. 1740-80

Ecorche of Standing Man. Jean Antoine Houdon. 1792

Ecorche statuette of “Horse Trainer”. 16th C. / Drawing of an Ecorche Statuette. 17th C.

Henry Gray. Anatomy descriptive and surgical. 1858

“anatomical illustration had as much to do……with aesthetics and theological understanding as with the narrower intentions of medical illustration as now understood’

Martin Kemp

Spectacular Bodies

2000

“an event in the order of knowledge”

Foucault. 1966

Anthropology, psychology, the social sciences

John LampreyFront and Profile views of a Malayan male. c1868-9

Carl and Frederick Dammann. The Races of Men. 1875

Civilised Europeans ………..Australians, Melanesians and Micronesians

Phrenology

Physiognomy

Philippe Pinel. Traite medico-philosophique. Paris. 1801

Hugh Welch Diamond. Photographs of the Insane. 1850s. Surrey County Asylum.

“each picture speaks for itself with the most marked impression and indicates the exact point which had been reached in the scale of unhappiness”

Francis Galton. Composites. 1880s

“to co-operate with the workings of nature by seeing that humanity shall be represented by the fittest races”

Cesare Lombroso. Psychologist and Physician. L’Uomo Delinquente. 1878

“Man is only a recent invention”

Foucault. 1966

soft versus hard, intuitive versus analytical, inductive versus deductive, visual versus logical, random versus systematic, autonomous versus collaborative

Foucault. 1966

18th C; the great unflawed table of species, genera and classes……nature is posited only through the grid of denominations and – though without such names it would remain mute and invisible – it glimmers far off beyond them

Art, nature and order

“A mere naturalistic copy of a plant on

to an industrial object will not in

itself form ornament….In order

to become ornament, natural

forms must be arranged in some orderly pattern…”

1895

Eugene Grasset. 1897.

Phillippe Wolfers. Civilisation and Barbary. 1897

She is incessantly speaking to us but betrays not her secret….She is the only

artist.

Goethe. Aphorisms

Metamorphosis

Alfonse Mucha. La Nature. 1900

R. Lalique. Dragonfly Woman. 1897

“not only with them, but of them”

Louis Sullivan

the inextricable and completely unitary fabric of of all that was visible of things ..to write the

history of a plant or an animal was as much a matter of …its elements or organs….the virtues that it was thought to possess… the legends

and stories….

Foucault. 1966

We must seek to use every means at our disposal to avoid seeing in

events or things, a greater degree of order than that which actually exists

E.J. Zeller. 1964

Richard Ross. 1985

Gerhard Lang. The Typical Inhabitant of Schloss-Nauses. 1992

Jo Spence/Terry Dennet The Cancer Project. 1982

Property of Jo Spence? and Monster.

Christine Borland. 1999HeLa Hot / Photograph of Henrietta Lacks

“In short…….science needs the humanities to teach us the quirky and richly subjective side of our own enterprise, to instruct us in

optimal skills for communication, and to place proper boundaries upon our

competencies”

Stephen J Gould. The Hedgehog, the Fox and the Magister’s Pox. 2004