Biomedicine in museums

The regulation of public health data collection and display is an interesting field of research for historians of contemporary public health. Here’s how I came to think about it:

On our way back to Copenhagen from three days of vacation on the island of Öland off the coast of SE Sweden with its beautiful and peculiar landscape (especially the alvar heath), we took a short break in Kristianopel, once (in the early 17th century) an important and heavily fortified Danish border town, now a tranquil vacation resort.

While Anna went down to the beach to take a swim in the Baltic Sea, I took a closer look at the local billboard where I found, among announcements for local flea markets and invitations to parties for young church-goers, an official report on the bathing water quality issued two days earlier by an accredited laboratory:

 

saying: 

• E. coli: 0 mpn/100 ml, measured by the Colilert-18 method
• Intestinal enterococci: 13 CFU/100 ml, measured according to ISO 7899-2

Zero E.coli is fine, of course, but 13 CFU (colony forming units) of enterococci (common faeces bacteria) is not so good. Wikipedia informs me that the state of Hawaii accepts only 7 CFU/100 ml before posting warnings! The municipality of Karlskrona, however, concludes that the water quality is “tjänlig” (suitable).

I’m probably about the only person visiting Kristianopel who has ever cared to read, let alone understood, the water quality report. Regulations issued by the Swedish Environmental Protection Agency stipulate that local authorities must make such tests (see Naturvårdsverkets författningssamling 2008:8) and make them publicly available. But apparently the local authorities don’t have to announce the results in a way that makes sense to visitors to the beach—for example that the Kristianopel water is twice as bad as what they accept in Honolulu.

Well, Anna didn’t catch any nasty bugs and the rest is for the Kristianopolitians to consider further. But that said, I think their water quality report raises an interesting general issue. Ground-level ozone, pollen levels, etc. are heavily displayed on TV, in newspapers, etc.; for example, the National Museum of Natural History in Sweden issues a daily pollen prognosis report on the web. What other kinds of public health data are displayed in public? How are these data displayed? Through which media? And which are the political processes behind the decisions to have such data collected and broadcasted to the public?

In fact, the history of public health could be understood (cf. Dorothy Porter’s Health, Civilization and the State: A History of Public Health From Ancient to Modern Times, 1998; read a good review here) as the continuous political negotation of such data and their public display.

Everyone in southern Scandinavia interested in genetics and democracy should take the opportunity to attend a seminar series organised at the University of Lund in October through December. Dates and preliminary speakers include:

October 27

• A. Hedgecoe, Sussex: “The Politics of Personalised Medicine”

November 17

• A. Clarke, Cardiff: “Genes, Knowledge and Autonomy: Whose Knowledge? What Knowledge? When?”
• H. Gottweis, Vienna: “Operating Biobanks: Towards the Governance of Disappearing Bodies”

December 8

• L. Koch, Copenhagen: “The Politics of Life – past and present use of genetic knowledge”
• B. Wynne, Lancaster: “Genetic Risk – expert and lay perceptions”

More details later (or contact Niclas Hagen, Niclas.Hagen@svet.lu.se, for more info).

If you think the last post was too conventional, presentation-wise, try this word cloud version:

Generated by Wordle, a free service designed by Jonathan Feinberg, which allows you to create a word cloud from any text or url, and adopt a variety of fonts, layouts, and color schemes. See Jonathan’s blog here.

Nifty! Cannot handle pics though. Not yet — maybe next functionality? (Would be great to be able to make your own picture cloud).

Here’s another variety (the possibilities are endless):

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The city of Kalmar on the southeast coast of Sweden has just been endowed with a fabulous new art museum: Kalmar Konstmuseum—a tall, black, wood-covered concrete building hidden among the high trees in the old city park. Something like a hybrid between a postmodern fire watch tower and the Royal Library building in Copenhagen (the Black Diamond). The architectural innovation has received much acclaim, both in Sweden (e.g., here) and internationally (see last issue of Icon, not on the net yet)

 

In my mind, the most impressive of the three inaugural exhibitions is Swetlana Heger‘s ‘Smoke (Liberté Toujours)’—five collages of small photos of women, each and everyone of them smoking a cigarette.

 

A face and a cigarette, a face and a cigarette, a face and a cigarette … hundreds of women: posing, contemplating, inhaling, exhaling.
 
Never have I seen such a collection of images of beautiful, smart, independent, distinguished, alluring and gorgeous women devoted to the necessity of smoking. Never has the idea of the sublimity of the practice of smoking been expressed so manifestly in art. Smoking is most certainly addictive, disgusting and deadly dangerous. But it also aesthetically forceful. (This was the theme of Richard Klein’s excellent book Cigarettes are sublime, 1994).

The aesthetics, economy and politics of smoking is a difficult field. On the one hand, the health-care establishment, backed by strong epidemiological evidence, has really good arguments for intensifying the war on smoking, especially in the developing world. On the other hand, millions of smokers cannot be wrong, can they? People don’t just smoke because they crave for nicotine or are manipulated by tobacco advertisements. If smoking wasn’t a pleasure—and an aesthetically attractive (at least if you don’t kiss the smoker) one as well—nobody would buy these sexy little suicide sticks.

Swetlana Heger’s exhibition in Kalmar addresses this dilemma indirectly without becoming didactic or explicitly political. Excellent public health art!

The BIOS Centre at the LSE is organizing a conference about the politics of the life sciences in an ‘age of biological control’, 16-18 September next year (i.e., 2009). The organisers are particularly interested in papers that Read More

Yesterday I wrote about my experience of visiting Le Laboratoire in Paris. In Chapter 6 of his recent book Artscience (2008) the founder, David Edwards, explains the background for his art-science center.

The son of a chemist, David was trained as a chemical engineer, then continued to graduate school where he did theoretical fluid mechanics. After his PhD in the 1980s he took up a postdoc in Haifa where the first Intifada opened his eyes to the world outside theoretical chemistry. He started creative writing as a side chore and in the 1990s he shared his time between MIT’s writing programme and working in Robert Langer’s (this year’s Millennium Prize winner) biotech lab on drug-delivery through aerosols. The lab work led to a paper in Science, in 1997, that suggested a new and better method for manufacturing and distributing drug particles.

Like so many other biotech researchers, David used his knowledge to start a biotech company. The aim of David’s company was to deliver insulin in the form of the new kind of aerosol. It apparently went very well, because only two years later he and his co-founders sold to a big pharma company, earning a lot of money (“the largest accrual of value at the time in biotechnology history”), giving David, his wife and his kids enough to realise some of their dreams.

Armed with this new and unexpected wealth, Read More

Last august, we invited the founder of Le Laboratorie in Paris, David Edwards, to our workhop on ‘Biomedicine and Aesthetics in a Museum Context’. His presentation was short and (and at least to me) not very clear, so last time I was in Paris I took the opportunity to see his new art and science meeting spot.

Le Laboratoire is placed in a former film studio close to the Louvre in the heart of Paris. The exterior is non-assuming; you have to look for it to find it.

Inside/downstairs is a big room with a raw, industrial look. Texts explain this is a “center of experimentation in art and design based on the notion of art and science as process toward a creative end”. It is emphatically not a museum (it eludes “classical curatorial care”) but is about innovation—to “facilitate discipline crossing” and “catalyzing innovation” by means of “artscience, this ability to appreciate and develop an aesthetic and scientific sensibility”:

We work with highy creative artists and designers and seek dreams of idea translation that cannot be formulated without the participation of a leading scientist

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Continuing the thread of thought in our art-science session at the SLSA meeting in Berlin in early June, I’ve just read David Edwards’s Artscience: creativity in the post-Google generation (Harvard University Press, 2008).

In Chapter 3 (“Idea translations in cultural institutions”), Edwards gives an interesting argument for bringing art into science and medical museums through the example of Wolf Peter Fehlhammer’s directorship of Deutsches Museum in Munich, the first and biggest science and technology museum in Germany, in 1993-2004.

As Edwards points out science museums and science centers have traditionally used art “to communicate the science message” in order to reverse the public skepticism of science. This was not Fehlhammer’s view of the art-science relation. Coming from a position as professor in chemistry at Freie Universität in Berlin “with a passion for the aesthetics of science” and with a belief that the future flourishing of science depends on “its ability to embrace the art of science”, he took another road when he was hired to head Deutsches Museum in 1993.

Fehlhammer wanted a science renaissance in the museum. In his own words, he wished to

reconcile people with the fascinating if challenging ‘Leonardo world’ [i.e., the world of contemporary science] around them. And, then, science might regain its former place, even reach new heights, and at the same time reestablish a social contract (p. 63).

This idea were realised in a number of events, including a Kunst-und-Wissenschaft programme, a laboratory for new electronic music, and several exhibitions. Fehlhammer’s favourite, says Edwards, was a performance art exhibit where artist Theda Radtke parodied a scientific lecture, showing how academic form takes over research substance. The art performance deconstructed the standardised rituals of science in order to remind the spectators about the original freshness, vulnerability, surprise and groping for truth that basically motivate most scientists to do science.

The idea was then not just to get art works as such into the Deutsche Museum. What concerned Fehlhammer, according to Edwards, was “how to engage artists to disrupt the way the public viewed science, how to empower artists within the museum … to challenge and disturb, to show the complexity of art and science and the dialog that must take place between the two” (p. 62). In other words, Fehlhammer wanted “to see art in the museum as provocateur” (pp. 59-60).
 
This is an interesting way of seeing the art-science relation in museums. In Fehlhammer’s vision, art should play the same role in science museums as it often does, or at least should do, in galleries and art museums, viz., to shatter our taken-for-granted views and understandings of the world. Accordingly, under Peter Fehlhammer’s directorship Deutsche Museum was partly turned into an art museum, and when the museum celebrated its 100th anniversary in 2003 “Fehlhammer received laudatory letters of congratulation from art museums all over the world” (p. 67).

(In a later post I will get back to David Edwards’s idea of a ‘laboratory’ for “experiment, action, and movement in and between the arts and sciences” which he is creating in Paris right now.)

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.

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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).

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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:

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].