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July 2008

Art is smart, art is chic, art is sophisticated (Why do museums want to bring art and science together? — part 7)

By Biomedicine in museums

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:

Art and scientific citizenship (Why do museums want to bring art and science together? — part 6)

By Biomedicine in museums

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].

Books for the summer vacation

By Biomedicine in museums

Here are the books I brought for the summer vacation (they do fit together in my own mind, somehow):

J. Craig Venter, A life decoded: my genome, my life (Viking, 2007) – see earlier post.

David Edwards, Artscience: creativity in the post-Google generation (Harvard University Press, 2008) – see post on Tuesday (I hope).

Eric Margolis and Stephen Laurence (eds), Creations of the mind: theories of artifacts and their representation (Oxford University Press, 2007) – to be reviewed for Isis.

Mark Paterson, The senses of touch: haptics, affects and technologies (Berg, 2007) – much needed food for our next research application to the Danish Strategic Research Council.

Slavoj Zizek, Violence: Six sideways reflections (Profile Books, 2008) – Zizek keeps one’s critical mind alive!

Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Multitude: war and democracy in the age of empire (Hamish Hamilton, 2004) – I have to re-read it to understand what they really mean by ‘multitude’.

Art as a cross-disciplinary integrator (Why do museums want to bring art and science together? — part 5)

By Biomedicine in museums

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]

Craig Venter’s A Life Decoded – a captivating read for adult boys (and for historians of the contemporary life sciences)

By Biomedicine in museums

Most autobiographies of scientists are terribly boring—soulless accumulations of facts of hardly any interest for others than the near family combined with humourless vindications of the author’s inflated ego—best used as temporary cures against insomnia.

When I bought Craig Venter’s A Life Decoded (Viking 2007) more than half a year ago I didn’t have high expectations. A rapid look at the plates—with the usual mix of photos of the subject as a young man hiking with friends and as a mature man meeting other famous men—confirmed my prejudice about the genre and I left the book in the perhaps-to-be-read pile. Not even Venter’s commanding blue eyes on the dust cover could persuade me to open it again.

It would probably have remained stuck away if I hadn’t met Joan Leach at the PCST-10 meeting in Malmö last week. We had a short chat about autobiography and popular understanding of science and she mentioned that she had read Venter’s book and had found it “so bad”. Strong opinions use to trigger my curiosity, so I brought it on my summer vacation—and I must admit that I’m captivated by this exciting, elementary well-written story about the maverick who beat them all.

J. Craig Venter is probably best known to the public for being the outsider who won the race for sequencing the human genome in the late 1990s. The entrepreneur who invented the so called ‘shot-gun’ method which proved to be faster and cheaper than the official Human Genom Project consortium approach. The bad guy of genomics who left NIH to found two consecutive private research institutes (first The Institute for Genomic Research, then Celera Genomics) and allegedly wanted to make money out of patenting genes instead of giving the code to humanity.

Venter doesn’t try to diminish his maverick persona. If anything he inflates it. The basic story-line of A Life Decoded could be the manuscript for a Western movie. Venter portrays himself as the honest, outspoken, no-bullshit guy who was seasoned in Vietnam and who has defended fact-production and efficient science-making against a politically corrupt genomic establishment. He doesn’t try to hide his contempt for the big power players in the game, including Jim Watson, Francis Collins and John Sulston, their (in his view) political maneuvring and protection of institutional interests. His Penguin/Viking publisher has probably toned down some of the most acerbic character assassinations but there is still much left. One of the few scientists in a power position that emerges unscathed is the former editor of Science magazine, Donald Kennedy.

There is one important part of the public picture which Venter vehemently rejects, however, namely that he should have had any economic interests in the race for the genome. He argues over and over again that he wasn’t in it for the money; on the contrary, his move from NIH to the corporate world was, he says, the only way he could finance his scientifically and economically superior sequencing methodology and save it from being buried by the HGP politicians and apparatchniks. Accordingly, the villains are not just the HGP officials and Wellcome Trust bureaucrats like Michael Morgan, but also corporate executives who tried to stop him from generously publishing his gene data. The portrait of the profit-hungry head of PerkinElmer, Tony White, is particularly unflattering.

Venter has an axe to grind and he grinds it efficiently. After 300 pages, I’m inclined (without having had time to check his sources) to buy the main thrust of his story, from childhood to the present. Especially since Venter is not a lonely rider. He has bonded with other apparently honest, no-bullshit scientists and entrepreneurs who, like him, believe in the power of hard work and attention to detail, and who always put facts before politics. Venter certainly has his share of enemies, but apparently he also has droves of devoted collagues and friends who support his version of the story of the gene wars.

His knack for organising others to work for him is also reflected in the production of his autobiography. After having written some 240.000 words, i.e., more than twice the size of an ordinary book, Venter hired a Daily Telegraph journalist to help him trim and reorganise the text and to conduct interviews with other main actors in the story. His current fiancée gave him constant feedback, and several friends and colleagues, not to mention crew members of his famous yacht Sorcerer II, read multiple drafts. This doesn’t mean that Craig Venter has had a ghostwriter—it means that A Life Decoded is as much a team-work as the scientific projects he has led. The professional support-team is probably the explanation for why this is also an unusually well-written book: as literature (don’t forget that auto/biography is as much literature as history) it competes favourably with most mystery novels.

One feature of the book that works in favour of Venter’s version is the constant focus on the scientific and technical aspects of the work. True, there is a lot about politics in this book, but compared with many other autobiographies of scientists there is even more about science. Venter goes out of his way to explain the scientific and technical problems he encountered—from his work on the adrenalin receptor in the late 1970s and early 1980s to the jigsaw-like genome assembly in the 1990s.

Accordingly, long stretches of A Life Decoded are lucid introductions to bits and pieces of the history of biochemistry, molecular biology and genomics in the revolutionary quarter century from 1975 to 2000; an aspect of the book which in itself makes it obligatory reading for graduate students in the life sciences and for historians of contemporary biomedicine. It’s all told from Venter’s personal perspective, of course, like everything else in this strongly subjective story; but after all this is one of the limitations (and strengths) of the autobiographical genre. (Those who want another side of the story should also read John Sulston and Georgina Ferry’s The Common Thread, 2003.)

But first of all A Life Decoded is—personally, politically, scientifically—a book about passion in science. Venter describes his frustration when procedures and machinery didn’t function as planned, and he relates the feeling of exctasy and relief when things worked, results were pouring in, and yet another article—about the Haemophilus influenzae genome, the Drosophila melanogaster genome, the mouse genome, and eventually the human genome—was sent for publication in the most prestigious scientific journals.

Venter could have chosen to write yet another boring, self-congratulatory  autobiography. Well, it is self-congratulatory and there are many successes in this story to be congratulated. But in addition to the triumphs, Venter also invites the reader to share his emotional ups and downs, even the painful and depressive feelings and (rare) suicidal thoughts. Forget everything you’ve heard about life sciences as boring. Craig Venter’s life in science has been an emotional roller-coaster.

The impression of a man who is driven by the passion for scientific success rather than for institutional power is reinforced by the fact that this book, compared with many other autobiographies, leaves most of the dinners-and-meetings-with-important-people stuff out. When, on one occasion, Venter and his second wife Claire were invited to dine at Clintons’s table on a New Year’s Eve dinner, he summarizes the event in four lines, concluding that Hillary was “like a sponge eagerly absorbing what I had to say about the genome”.

Me too. I eagerly absorbed Venter’s saga in one reading session and I already look forward to the sequel. The man is only 61 years old and despite having a lot of bad genes (he did of course sequence himself!) and having been diagnosed with early skin cancer, he will hopefully live long enough to write the story about his present work too. His mapping of the microbial genome of the oceans and his new institute’s quest for artifical life promises to put even his 1990s genomic triumphs in the shadow. After these there will hopefully come even more exciting projects out of this man who seems to be genetically determined to live a life in competition.

An elementary exciting read for all boys between 15 and 95. So now I believe I understand why Joan didn’t like it 🙂

Art and the biomedical invisibles (Why do museums want to bring art and science together? — part 4)

By Biomedicine in museums

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]

Once aesthetically corrupted, always corrupted (Why do museums want bring art and science together – part 3)

By Biomedicine in museums

Which were Medical Museion’s reasons for going into art and aesthetics? The first on my list of ideal-typical rationalities is what I call “once-aesthetically-corrupted, always-corrupted”.

The argument goes like this: As Sepp Gumbrecht pointed out in his seminal 2004 book The Production of Presence: What Meaning Cannot Convey, most humanities scholars, including historians, are engaged in interpretative and hermeneutic practices. But rarely in aestethic practices, i.e., what he calls the ‘production of presence’. Same for historian-as-curators in the world of science, technology and medical museums: Most STM-curators see their museums as sites for historical narration, interpretation and contextualisation, but rarely as sites where visitors are engaged in sensual and aesthetic experiences, in presence-production.

What changed our minds, from seeing our museum as an institution for meaning-production only, to an institution involved also in presence-production was when our neighbour, the Danish Museum of Art and Design in Copenhagen, was setting up an anniversary exhibition in 2004. Since we were, and still are, good neighbours, their curators went over to our place to take a close look at our collections, and they went back with over 60 artefacts which we had, until then, routinely classified as historical objects. But they decided these were aesthetic objects.

That was our aesthetic epiphany, our moment of entrance into the aesthetics of medical objects. And since then our museum has never really been the same. Suddenly we saw things that medical historians have never really seen. And more generally speaking, I believe that this is one of the rationales for why STM-museums in the last 15-20 years have, more or less by default, begun to incorporate aesthetic approaches and art in their exhibitions:  Once you have tried it, there is no way back.

Once the discursive rationality of the historian has been corrupted by the irrationality of aesthetic judgement, you cannot really undo it.

More and more of us, former science, technology and medical history museums, are becoming fallen historical angels.
(Photo: Snowrunner 2006, from Flickr; creative commons)

[next post will be about biomedical invisibles]