Posts Tagged ‘Anatomy’

“Still Life: The Art of Anatomy,” Dunedin Public Art Gallery, Dunedin, New Zealand, Through September 12

Posted on August 20th, 2010 • Filed under mediarosa • No Comments

I just found out about an excellent looking exhibition now on in Dunedin, New Zealand; the exhibition is called “Still Life: The Art of Anatomy,” and it frames a variety of historical and contemporary anatomical teaching tools held in public and private hands–including models and illustrations–as artworks in a fine art setting.

Images of the exhibition above and full details below; if you are based in New Zealand, be sure to check this out!

Still Life: The Art of Anatomy
Saturday, 10 July 2010 – 12 September 2010
Dunedin Public Art Gallery
Dunedin, New Zealand

Noted Dunedin based filmmaker and medical doctor Paul Trotman, has worked closely with the Dunedin Public Art Gallery in researching Dunedin’s rich collections towards the realization of Still Life: The Art of Anatomy. This exhibition brings together an array of historical and contemporary items, such as Dr John Halliday Scott’s elegant anatomical drawings and old master prints, through to porcelain and wax casts of aspects of the body and the latest interactive computer generated 3D anatomical models. Still Life provides a stunning insight into this complex subject and also reveals the important lineage that science and art shares through the analysis, distillation and depiction of the human form.

You can find out more by clicking here or here.

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Upcoming Morbid Anatomy Presents Events at Observatory This August

Posted on August 16th, 2010 • Filed under mediarosa • No Comments

The remainder of August will be a very exciting and busy time for Morbid Anatomy Presents at Observatory. The weeks ahead will bring a New Zealand-based medical museum curator giving a virtual tour of his collection, Wellcome Collection curator Kate Forde lecturing about popular anatomical museums of 19th Century Europe as explored in last years popular “Exquisite Bodies” exhibition (for which I provided curatorial assistance), a screening of obscure films which influenced the Brothers Quay, an art exhibition opening party, and illustrated lectures on hermaphroditism, posthumanism, Japanese paper theater and spiritualism by a variety of artists, scholars and authors.

Full details for each of the seven (!!!) events follow below. Very much hope to see you at some, all, or even one of these amazing events!

“Angels, Animals and Cyborgs: Visions of Human Enhancement”
An illustrated lecture by Salvador Olguin
Date: Friday, August 20
Time: 8:00 PM
Admission: $5
Presented by Morbid Anatomy
** Note: This event is followed by the free Substructure Superstructure exhibition–featuring artworks by Friese Undine– opening party, which will begin at 9:30.

Posthumanism is currently a hot term in certain scientific and academic circles. Deplored by many as yet another fashionable post, defended by its supporters as a term that reflects our current fears, hopes and changing reality, posthumanism is an attempt to think seriously about the effects that technology and its rapid pace has in our society, our bodies and our minds, and to consider that these effects might change the human species as we know it.

Throughout history, the desire to transcend the limitations of our condition as biological beings has been constantly present. From theological discussions regarding the nature of the human body after the resurrection of the flesh, to the projections of today’s futurists, and including figures such as the Golem, Frankenstein’s monster, angels and cyborgs, our culture has imagined bodies with wider possibilities than ours. Myth, science, art and literature have treated the topic of body enhancement, considering its pros, its cons and its limitations. In a time when pacemakers, prostheses, cloning and cryogenics are making these old dreams of human enhancement a reality, it can be fruitful to look back and compare the wildest fantasies of posthumanism with its intellectual predecessors, to get a better picture of what is going on.

This lecture will touch on some key examples of visions of human enhancement, in order to put the hopes and dreams of posthumanism in perspective, and try to sketch a genealogy of this set of ideas.

Salvador Olguin was born in Monterrey, Mexico. He holds a Master’s degree in Humanities by the Instituto Tecnológico y de Estudios Superiores de Monterrey, and he worked as an Assistant Professor and Course Coordinator for three years in that same institution. He is a writer and playwright, and has published poems and essays in magazines –such as Tierra Adentro, Parteaguas, Revista de Literatura Mexicana Contemporánea and the journal Anamesa, among others– both in Mexico and the United States. His research interests orbit around the conjunction of death, the body, technology and representation. He quit his former job and life in order to come to New York, where he is currently a second year student in the Draper Masters Program in Humanities and Social Thought.

“Manga Kamishibai: The Art of Japanese Paper Theater, 1930 to 1960″
An Illustrated Lecture and artifact demonstration by Eric P. Nash, author of Manga Kamishibai: The Art of Japanese Paper Theater
Date: Monday, August 23rd
Time: 8:00
Admission: $5
Presented by Morbid Anatomy and part of the Oxberry Pegs Presents series
*** Please note: Books will be available for sale and signing and authentic kamishibai theatre will be available to view

Before giant robots, space ships, and masked super heroes filled the pages of Japanese comic books–known as manga–such characters were regularly seen on the streets of Japan in kamishibai stories. Manga Kamishibai: The Art of Japanese Paper Theater tells the history of this fascinating and nearly vanished Japanese art form that paved the way for modern-day comic books, and is the missing link in the development of modern manga.

During the height of kamishibai in the 1930s, storytellers would travel to villages and set up their butais (miniature wooden prosceniums) on the back of their bicycles, through which illustrated boards were presented. The story boards–colorful, hand-painted, original art drawn with the great haste that signifies manga, glued on cardboard and lacquered to protect them in the rain–told stories ranging from action-packed westerns to science-fiction stories to ninja tales to monster stories to Hiroshima stories to folk tales and melodramas for the girls. Golden Bat, a supernatural, cross-eyed, skull-faced superhero; G-men; Cinderella; the Lone Ranger; and even Batman and Robin starred in kamishibai stories. The storytellers acted as entertainers, acting out the parts of each character with different voices and facial expressions, and sometimes too, they became reporters, when the stories were the nightly news reports on World War II. Kamishibai was so popular and widespread, that when television hit Japan in the mid-1950s, it was known as denki kamishibai–electric paper theater.

Tonight, author Eric P. Nash will tell the story of kamishibai as detailed in his gorgeous new book Manga Kamishibai: The Art of Japanese Paper Theater. He will also bring in a genuine kamishibai set from the 1930s and make copies of his book available for sale and signing.

Eric P. Nash has been a researcher and writer for the New York Times since 1986. He is the author of several books about art, architecture, and design, including Manga Kamishibai: The Art of Japanese Paper Theater, MiMo: Miami Modernism Revealed, and The Destruction of Penn Station. His work has also appeared in The Wall Street Journal, The San Francisco Chronicle and Discover magazine.

Hermaphrodites: Sex Undetermined
An illustrated lecture by Artist and Animator Halli Gomberg on the 1937 publication Genital Abnormalities Hermaphoditism & Related Adrenal Diseases
Date: Tuesday, August 24th
Time: 8pm
Admission: $5
Presented by Morbid Anatomy
***PLEASE NOTE: Please be advised that this event will contain graphic images that may be offensive to some viewers.

Although American society prides itself on the appearance of sexual liberation, intersexed people–traditionally called hermaphrodites–remain a taboo subject. Little is known and much is speculated. It is a topic that both fascinates and repulses, and too often it is easy to overlook the human element and instead see an object of confused sexuality and genitalia.

Tonight’s lecture looks to break through some of these walls with the discussion of the book Genital Abnormalities Hermaphoditism & Related Adrenal Diseases. Published in 1937 by John Hopkins University, this medical text contains over 50 years of studies on intersexed cases; procedures used to “fix” this problem, and most importantly the stories of the people whose lives were forever altered by the result of a genetic mutation. Discussed will be the surgical techniques employed on patients (predecessors of today’s genital reassignment surgeries), the lives of the patients behind the case numbers, and lastly modern repercussions of Hermaphoditism.

Halli Gomberg is a 2011 candidate for Master of Fine Arts in Design and Technology at Parsons, The New School. There, she specializes in motion graphics and interactive web technology. She has always fostered a passion for the obscure and forgotten elements of humanity. This has led her to build an impressive curiosity cabinet of rare medical photos, books, religious reliquaries, and antique glass. Her animation and physical computing work can be seen here.

Exquisite Bodies: or the Curious and Grotesque History of the Anatomical Model
An illustrated lecture by Wellcome Collection Curator Kate Forde
Date: Thursday, August 26
Time: 8:00 PM
Admission: $5
Presented by Morbid Anatomy

Tonight, Kate Forde of London’s Wellcome Collection will deliver an illustrated lecture detailing the rise and fall of the popular anatomical museum in 19th century Europe as detailed in The Wellcome’s recent ‘Exquisite Bodies’ exhibition.

The ‘Exquisite Bodies’ exhibition, which was curated with the assistance of Morbid Anatomy’s Joanna Ebenstein, was inspired by the craze for anatomy museums and their artifacts–particularly wax anatomical models–in 19th century Europe. In London, Paris, Brussels and Barcelona displays of wax models became popular with visitors seeking an unusual afternoon’s entertainment. The public were invited to learn about the body’s internal structure, its reproductive system and its vulnerability to disease–especially the sexually transmitted kind–through displays that combined serious science with more than a touch of prurience and horror.

At a time when scandal surrounded the practice of dissection, the medical establishment gave these collections of human surrogates a cautious welcome; yet only a few decades later they fell into disrepute, some even facing prosecution for obscenity. This talk will trace the trajectory of these museums in a highly illustrated lecture featuring many of the historical artifacts featured in the show.

To find out more about the exhibition ‘Exquisite Bodies,’ click here and here.

Kate Forde is Curator of Temporary Exhibitions at the Wellcome Collection, London. She is interested in the role of museums in the shaping of cultural memory and in the display of fine art within science-based institutions. Her current research is taking her from the great dust-heaps of Victorian London to Staten Island’s landfill Fresh Kills for an exhibition with the working title ‘Dirt’. You can see a preview of tonight’s lecture by clicking here.

It’s Scotland Jim, But Not As We Know it: The W.D. Trotter Anatomy Museum – A Brief History
An illustrated lecture and virtual tour by Chris Smith, Curator of the W.D. Trotter Anatomy Museum, University of Otago, Dunedin, New Zealand
Date: Friday, August 27
Time: 8:00 PM
Admission: $5
Presented by Morbid Anatomy

Tonight, Chris Smith, curator of the W.D. Trotter Anatomy Museum of the University of Otago in Dunedin, New Zealand, will give a brief history of the Museum, its collections and the role it plays today. As part of the southern-most Medical School in the world, this isolation can be both a hindrance as well as of benefit; but with its foundation built upon a strong Scottish heritage, the traditions of Anatomical Teaching have been sustained and continue to strengthen in this proud institution. From the early plaster, wax and papier-mâché through to todays technologies of 3D imaging and plastination, you will be given a whirlwind tour of this collection and some of the personalities responsible for its creation and development over the last 135 years.

Chris Smith is a trained Secondary School Teacher with 10 years experience in teaching and education and a passion for the collection, teaching and preservation of history. Chris changed gears in 2005 to take up the role as Anatomy Museum Curator and Anatomy Department Photographer at the University of Otago. In this role Chris has maintained and further developed the use of anatomical specimens, both historic and modern, for teaching and research, as well as increasing public awareness of the collection and the history of the museum and department. In 2007 and 2008 he traveled to Thailand as part of the Bio-archaeology team to excavate and photograph human remains at Ban Non Wat (Origins of Angkor Project), a prehistoric Neolithic to Iron Age site. He regularly attends conferences within New Zealand and neighboring Australia, visiting institutions and collections and in 2008 received a Queen Elizabeth the 2nd (QEII) Technicians’ Study Award, which enabled him to visit institutions and collections in United Kingdom and attend the European Association of Museums of the History of Medical Science Congress held that year in Edinburgh. It was at this event that he and Joanna crossed paths and as such with a visit to meet new family in the US in 2010 and making contact with Joanna, he has been put in this privileged position of being able to share a little about ‘his’ museum.

Animators The Brothers Quays Have Watched and Other Likely Things
A collection of short films presented by SVA’s Thyrza Nichols Goodeve
Date: Monday, August 30rd
Time: 8:00
Admission: $5
Presented by Morbid Anatomy and part of the Oxberry Pegs Presents series

Although The Brothers Quay are a union of imagination completely their own, they have been influenced by specific Eastern European animators. On August 30th Thyrza Nichols Goodeve will present a selection of films from Walerian Borowczyk, Jan Lenica, Priit Pärn, Yuri Norstein, and Igor Kovalyov followed by various animations from the Polish and Zagreb school who might sit happily, albeit covered with dust, inside a Quay-esque universe.

Thyrza Nichols Goodeve is a writer and interviewer active in the field of contemporary art and culture. She is on the School of Visual Arts faculty, active in the MFA Art Writing and Criticism Program, the art history program, and the masters computer art and film programs. She teaches also in the MFA Digital + Media Program at the Rhode Island School of Design and is the program co-ordinator for the Maryland Institute College of Art (MICA) “MICA in NYC (DUMBO)” Summer Intensive program in Brooklyn, New York. She has published in Artforum, Parkett, Art in America, Artbyte, Guggenheim Magazine, The Village Voice, Tribeca Trib and Camerawork.

Documenting the Invisible: Spiritualism, Lily Dale, and Talking to the Dead
An illustrated lecture by photographer Shannon Taggart
Date: Tuesday, August 31
Time: 8:00 PM
Admission: $5
Presented by Morbid Anatomy

Spiritualism is a loosely organized religion based primarily on a belief in the ability to communicate with spirits of the dead. The movement began in upstate New York in 1848 when two young girls named Margaret and Kate Fox claimed to be in contact with the spirit of a dead peddler buried beneath their home. Photographer Shannon Taggart first became aware of Spiritualism as a teenager when her cousin received a reading in Lily Dale, NY, The World’s Largest Spiritualist Community. A medium there revealed a strange family secret about the death of their grandfather that proved to be true. Taggart became deeply curious about how someone could possibly know such a thing.

Thus began a five year photography project focused on Modern Spiritualism. During her image making she immersed myself in the history and philosophy of Spiritualism, had more readings than she can count, experienced spiritual healings, took part in séances, attended a psychic college and sat in a medium’s cabinet, all with her camera. Despite this exposure she finds herself no closer to any definitive answer of what it all means. She feels as if she has peered into a mystery.

Shannon Taggart is a freelance photographer based in Brooklyn, New York. She received her BFA in Applied Photography from the Rochester Institute of Technology. Her images have appeared in numerous publications including Blind Spot, Tokion, TIME and Newsweek. Her work has been recognized by the Inge Morath Foundation, American Photography, the International Photography Awards, Photo District News and the Alexia Foundation for World Peace, among others. Her photographs have been shown at Photoworks in Brighton, England, The Photographic Resource Center in Boston, Redux Pictures in New York, the Stephen Cohen Gallery in Los Angeles and most recently at FotoFest 2010 in Houston. For more about Shannon Taggart, visit www.shannontaggart.com.

You can find out more about these presentation here, here, here, here, here, here and here. You can get directions to Observatory–which is next door to the Morbid Anatomy Library (more on that here)–by clicking here. You can find out more about Observatory here, join our mailing list by clicking here, and join us on Facebook by clicking here.

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Morbid Anatomy Presents at Observatory Next Week (August 5 & 6): Lord Whimsy’s Curious Flora and Amy Herzog’s Pornographic Arcades!

Posted on July 31st, 2010 • Filed under mediarosa • No Comments

This Thursday and Friday at Observatory! Lord Whimsy on the curious flora of the bogs of Southern New Jersey–with live specimens and a book signing!–and Amy Herzog on the pornographic peepshows of Times Square as illuminated by Walter Benjamin’s Arcades Project. Hope to see you at one of both of these great events!

Full details follow:

Nature as Miniaturist: An Illustrated Survey of the Bogs of Southern New Jersey An Illustrated lecture and specimen demonstration with author, artist, and Gentleman Naturalist Lord Breaulove Swells Whimsy
Date: Thursday, August 5th
Time: 8:00
Admission: $5
Presented by Morbid Anatomy

Copies of Whimsy’s book The Affected Provincial’s Companion, Volume One will be available for sale and signing

Tonight, author, artist and Gentleman Naturalist Lord Breaulove Swells Whimsy will be giving an illustrated lecture on the botanical oddities found in the ancient, Ice Age bogs of the New Jersey Pine Barrens. These tiny, alien worlds are home to rare orchids, carnivorous plants, and bizarre species of plants and animals–some of which are found nowhere else on Earth. Whimsy, a lifelong resident of the Pine Barrens, will also give a demonstration of how to build and maintain your own container garden for these strange, wonderful plants. Live specimens of these plants will be on display, and care sheets for carnivorous plants like Venus Flytrap will also be made available. Whimsy’s book The Affected Provincial’s Companion, Volume One will also be available for sale and signing.

Lord Breaulove Swells Whimsy (aka V. Allen Crawford III) is an artist, designer, author, failed dandy, bushwhacking aesthete, and middle-aged dilettante. Whimsy is the author of The Affected Provincial’s Companion, Volume One (Bloomsbury), which has been optioned for film by Johnny Depp’s production company, Infinitum Nihil. He and his wife are proprietors of Plankton Art Co., an illustration and design studio. Their most notable project to date is the collection of 400 species identification illustrations that are on permanent display at the American Museum of Natural History’s Hall of Ocean Life.


Photo courtesy Bruce Hamilton

The Pornographic Arcades Project: Adaptation, Automation, and the Evolution of Times Square (1965-1975) An Illustrated lecture with Amy Herzog, professor of media studies and film studies program coordinator at Queens College, CUNY
Date: Friday, August 6
Time: 8:00
Admission: $5
Presented by Morbid Anatomy

Walter Benjamin, in his fragmentary Das Passagen-Werk, illuminated the resonances between urban architectural structures and the phenomena that define a cultural moment. “The Pornographic Arcades Project” is a work-in-progress, seeking to build on Benjamin’s insight to ask what a study of pornographic peep show arcades might reveal about the cultural imaginary of the late twentieth century.

Motion picture “peeping” machines have existed since the birth of cinema, and were often stocked with salacious titles. Public arcades devoted to pornographic peep booths only began to appear in the late 1960s, however, although once established, they proliferated wildly, becoming ubiquitous features in urban landscapes. Outfitted with recycled technologies, peep arcades were distinctly local enterprises that creatively exploited regional zoning and censorship laws. They became sites for diverse social traffic, and emerged as particularly significant venues for gay men, hustlers, prostitutes, and other marginalized groups. The film loops themselves often engage in a strange inversion of public and private, as “intimate interiors” are offered up to viewers, at the same time that the spectators are called out by the interface of the machines, and by the physical structures of the arcades.

Peep arcades set in motion a complex dynamic, one that sheds light on wider contemporary preoccupations: surveillance videography and social control; commodification, fetishization, and sexual politics; debates regarding vice and access to the public sphere. Less obvious are they ways in which the arcades subvert far older fascinations, such as technologies of anatomical display and the aesthetics of tableaux vivants.

Amy Herzog is associate professor of media studies and coordinator of the film studies program at Queens College, CUNY. She is the author of Dreams of Difference, Songs of the Same: The Musical Moment in Film (Minnesota, 2010). She recently curated an exhibition at The James Gallery, CUNY Graduate Center on the dialogue between pornographic peep loops and contemporary art practices; you can find out more about that exhibition, entitled “Peeps”, by clicking here.

You can find out more about thes presentation here and here. You can get directions to Observatory–which is next door to the Morbid Anatomy Library (more on that here)–by clicking here. You can find out more about Observatory here, join our mailing list by clicking here, and join us on Facebook by clicking here.

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Morbid Anatomy Slideshow on American Medical News Website

Posted on July 7th, 2010 • Filed under mediarosa • No Comments

The space where medicine and art intersects is often … well, weird. And fascinating. That realization is explored in the Morbid Anatomy Blog, written by Joanna Ebenstein, a graphic designer and photographer in Brooklyn, N.Y. One goal, Ebenstein says, is “to bring the art and history of medical museums to the awareness of a wider audience and to frame their artifacts as artistic and cultural objects with as much to say about their makers and the culture their makers inhabited as about medical knowledge…”

The American Medical News–a national trade publication for physicians published by the American Medical Association–just launched a nice little Morbid Anatomy slideshow on their website. If you are interested in seeing a nicely curated selection of images from the greater Morbid Anatomy project, and/or in learning a bit more about the stories behind these artifacts and spaces, I highly recommend you check it out!

You can access the slideshow by clicking here.

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A Few Upcoming Observatory Events Presented by Morbid Anatomy

Posted on June 29th, 2010 • Filed under mediarosa • No Comments

Pornographic peepshows and Walter Benjamin’s Arcades project! Forensic photography by a former forensic photographer! Saints and torture as they related to anatomical representation! Human memorial tattoos! Macabre Victorian i3D, lecture and private collection demonstration!

We’ve got a great bunch of new events coming up at Observatory in July and August; full details (in date order) follow. To see them in a neater and easier-to-read form, please click here.

Hope to see at one or many of these spectacular events!

Radical Detectives: Forensic Photography and the Aesthetics of Aftermath in Contemporary Art
An illustrated lecture by artist and former forensic photographer Luke Turner
Date: Tuesday, July 13
Time: 8:00 PM
Admission: $5
Presented by Morbid Anatomy

Forensic autopsy, crime, and death scene photographs hold a strong fascination in culture. These specific types of photographs present to the viewer a mediated confrontation with horror. In the context of a courtroom, there is a presupposition that the scientific or analytic use value assigned to the photograph will function to shift the viewer’s position from voyeur to detached collector of facts relevant to the legal system. Yet neither position is stable, and the psyche must contend with a complexity of vision that exceeds either classification.

In this slide show, artist and former forensic photographer Luke Tuner will present images from the history of forensic photography, slides from cases that he has photographed, and documentation of modern and contemporary art works that engage the viewer in the reconstruction process. Some relevant concepts explored by artists are crime scene reconstruction in Pierre Huyghe’s “Third Memory”, entropy in the work of Robert Smithson, accumulation in Barry LeVa’s pieces, the logic of sensation in the painting of Francis Bacon, something about that guy that had himself shot in a gallery, and many more. He will also discuss the curatorial work of Ralph Rugoff, and Luc Sante who have both made important connections between art and the forensic image.

Thoughts by philosophers of the abject/scientific, such as Julia Kristeva, Georges Bataille, Paul Feyerabend, Paul Virilio, and others, will be brought into play with the visual presentation. We will explore strategies of resistance to an “official” culture that attempts to legitimize a fixed methodology for the interpretation of evidence. As we emerge from art and philosophical tangents, the lecture will conclude with an argument for why the characters of Agent Dale Cooper from Twin Peaks and Laurent, the protagonist of Alain Robbe-Grillet’s The Erasers, personify two notions of the radical detective through their unconventional approaches to the interpretation of evidence.

Luke Turner is an artist / writer / gallery preparator, who previously worked for three years as a forensic photographer for various Medical Examiner and Coroner’s Offices. Luke has lectured at Glendale Community College in Los Angeles and at California College of the Arts in San Francisco. He is the recent founder of the art blog Anti-EstablishmentIntellectualLOL!.

Morbid Ink: Field Notes on the Human Memorial Tattoo
An Illustrated lecture with Dr. John Troyer, Deputy Director, Centre for Death and Society, University of Bath
Date: Tuesday July 20th
Time: 8:00
Admission: $5
Presented by Morbid Anatomy

In 1891, Samuel F. O’Reilly of New York, NY patented the first “…electromotor tattooing-machine,” a modern and innovative device that permanently inserted ink into the human skin. O’Reilly’s invention revolutionized tattooing and forever altered the underlying concept behind a human tattoo, i.e., the writing of history on the body. Tattooing of the body most certainly predates the O’Reilly machine (by several centuries) but one kind of human experience remains constant in this history: the memorial tattoo.

Memorial tattooing is, as Marita Sturken discusses the memorialization of the dead, a technology of memory. Yet the tattoo is more than just a representation of the dead. It is a historiographical practice in which the living person seeks to make death intelligible by permanently altering his or her own body. In this way, memorial tattooing not only establishes a new language of intelligibility between the living and the dead, it produces a historical text carried on the historian’s body. A memorial tattoo is an image but it is also (and most importantly) a narrative.

Human tattoos have been described over the centuries as speaking scars and/or the true writing of savages; cut from the body and then collected by Victorian era gentlemen. These intricately inked pieces of skin have been pressed between glass and then hidden away in museum collections, waiting to be re-discovered by the morbidly curious. The history of tattooing is the story of Homo sapiens’ self-invention and unavoidable ends.

Tattoo artists have a popular saying within their profession: Love lasts forever but a tattoo lasts six months longer.

And so too, I will add, does death

Dr. John Troyer is the Death and Dying Practices Associate and RCUK Fellow at the Centre for Death and Society at the University of Bath. He received his doctorate from the University of Minnesota in Comparative Studies in Discourse and Society in May 2006. From 2007-2008 he was a Visiting Assistant Professor in the Department of Comparative Studies at The Ohio State University teaching the cultural studies of science and technology. Within the field of Death Studies, he analyzes the global history of science and technology and its effects on the dead body. He is a co-founder of the Death Reference Desk website and his first book, Technologies of the Human Corpse, will appear in spring 2011.

Echoes of Mutilation: The Saints and their Afterlives
An illustrated lecture by Colin Dickey, author of Cranioklepty: Grave Robbing and the Search for Genius
Date: Saturday, July 24
Time: 8:00 PM
Admission: $5
Presented by Morbid Anatomy

In the wake of the photos of Abu Ghraib, images of torture have been pushed back into the forefront of American consciousness, but Western history has had a long and complicated relationship with images of torture. Colin Dickey discusses images of torture in the cult of Christian saints, particularly Saint Bartholomew (who was flayed alive), Saint Lucy (whose eyes were gouged out) and Saint Agatha (whose breasts were cut off). Inverting the traditional relationship of torturer and powerless victim, Christian imagery turned the act of torture into empowerment, where specific methods of torture became iconically associated with specific saints. As the cult of the saints waned, these images of torture began to filter into European consciousness in bizarre and fascinating ways, appearing in everything from Renaissance anatomy textbooks to the paintings of Paul Gauguin to the feminist art of the 1970’s.

Colin Dickey is the author of Cranioklepty: Grave Robbing and the Search for Genius, and the co-editor (with Nicole Antebi and Robby Herbst) of Failure! Experiments in Aesthetic and Social Practices. His fiction and nonfiction have appeared in Cabinet, TriQuarterly, and The Santa Monica Review. A native of the San Francisco Bay Area, he now lives in Los Angeles. This is a return visit for Colin, who lectured on Cranioklepty earlier this year at Observatory to great acclaim; more on that lecture can be found here.

Diableries, Medical Oddities and Ghosts in Amazing Victorian 3D!
An illustrated lecture and artifact display by filmmaker and collector Ronni Thomas
Date: Friday, July 30th
Time: 8:00 PM
Admission: $5
Presented by Morbid Anatomy

Tonight, join Observatory for a night of unique 3D stereo-views from the 1800s featuring HAUNTING double exposure ghost images, DISTURBING medical anomalies and the ever ELUSIVE french Diableries (or devil tissues)!

3D is very much in the news these days, and while hollywood has finally come close to perfecting this technology for the silver screen, people are largely unaware that the Victorians were also aficionados of 3D technologies, and that this interest often took a turn towards the macabre. Tonight, filmmaker and collector Ronni Thomas will lecture on the history of macabre 3D spectacles of the Victorian age, especially the infamous Diableries series–masterfully designed 3D stereo ’tissues’ created in france in the 19th century, backlit and featuring ornate scenes depicting the daily life of Satan in Hell (see image to left for example).Tongue in cheek and often controversial, these macabre spectacles give us a very interesting look at the 19th century’s lighthearted obsession with death and the macabre, serving as a wonderful demonstration of the Victorian fascination with themes such as the afterlife, heaven, hell and death.

In addtion to the lecture, Thomas will display original Diablaries and other artifacts from his own collection. Guests are encouraged to bring their own pieces and, better yet, a stereo-viewer.

The Pornographic Arcades Project: Adaptation, Automation, and the Evolution of Times Square (1965-1975)
An Illustrated lecture with Amy Herzog, professor of media studies and film studies program coordinator at Queens College, CUNY
Date: Friday, August 6
Time: 8:00
Admission: $5
Presented by Morbid Anatomy

Walter Benjamin, in his fragmentary Das Passagen-Werk, illuminated the resonances between urban architectural structures and the phenomena that define a cultural moment. “The Pornographic Arcades Project” is a work-in-progress, seeking to build on Benjamin’s insight to ask what a study of pornographic peep show arcades might reveal about the cultural imaginary of the late twentieth century.

Motion picture “peeping” machines have existed since the birth of cinema, and were often stocked with salacious titles. Public arcades devoted to pornographic peep booths only began to appear in the late 1960s, however, although once established, they proliferated wildly, becoming ubiquitous features in urban landscapes. Outfitted with recycled technologies, peep arcades were distinctly local enterprises that creatively exploited regional zoning and censorship laws. They became sites for diverse social traffic, and emerged as particularly significant venues for gay men, hustlers, prostitutes, and other marginalized groups. The film loops themselves often engage in a strange inversion of public and private, as “intimate interiors” are offered up to viewers, at the same time that the spectators are called out by the interface of the machines, and by the physical structures of the arcades.

Peep arcades set in motion a complex dynamic, one that sheds light on wider contemporary preoccupations: surveillance videography and social control; commodification, fetishization, and sexual politics; debates regarding vice and access to the public sphere. Less obvious are they ways in which the arcades subvert far older fascinations, such as technologies of anatomical display and the aesthetics of tableaux vivants.

Amy Herzog is associate professor of media studies and coordinator of the film studies program at Queens College, CUNY. She is the author of Dreams of Difference, Songs of the Same: The Musical Moment in Film (Minnesota, 2010). She recently curated an exhibition at The James Gallery, CUNY Graduate Center on the dialogue between pornographic peep loops and contemporary art practices; you can find out more about that exhibition, entitled “Peeps”, by clicking here.

You can find out more about these presentation here, here, here, here, and here, respectively. You can get directions to Observatory–which is next door to the Morbid Anatomy Library (more on that here)–by clicking here. You can find out more about Observatory here, join our mailing list by clicking here, and join us on Facebook by clicking here.

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Anatomy Class featuring Auzoux Female Anatomical Model, George Grantham Bain Collection, Shorpy

Posted on May 8th, 2010 • Filed under mediarosa • No Comments

Anatomy Class circa 1905, George Grantham Bain Collection, as found on Shorpy. Click on the image to see much larger, more detailed image; note especially the demure Auzoux female anatomical model to the left; you can see a color version of it here.

More on Auzoux and his work here; Via Turn of the Century blog.

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