Split + Splice
"Split + Splice" by Alan Sondheim, Summer 2010, pp. 99-100
In 2009, I exhibited my video What Remains at the University of Copenhagen’s medical museum. While there, I took the time to roam through an exhibition entitled “Split + Splice: Fragments from the Age of Biomedicine,” which had been organized by the Canadian artist, curator and academic Martha Fleming along with four post-doctoral researchers at the museum. I came away fascinated by the show’s combination of aesthetics and functional technology. “Split + Splice” privileged depth over spectacle, never turning the technology into obvious art but instead allowing it to speak for itself.
A red handbook provided textual accompaniment to the installations. There was little distinction between environment and object; there was a functioning laboratory “Cold Room,” for example. In another room was a standing “black box” the height of a man penetrated by endoscopes that viewers could use to look into it—not to mention a beautiful 18th-century anatomical theatre original to the building (which once housed the Royal Academy of Surgeons).
The show was divided, according to the handbook, into sections numbered 01. to 11.: Confluence (which involved everything coming together: diagnostic lab, animals and humans); Containing a Torrent (flows, containers); Avalanches of Data (biotech, infotech, registries, identifications, samplings, computations); Reality Show (mappings, scannings, models, modelling); In the Flesh—Under the Skin (microscopes, endoscopes, observation, penetration); Mass Observation (12-screen video installation, various modes of seeing/researching/ observing); Checkpoint! Is Everything in Place? (zones, storage, regulation); Good and Cold (Cold Room, cryogenics, preservation); Wanted—Unwanted (waste, disposal); Feeling Up and Feeling Down (pills, emotional modelling, more biotech); Retinal Image (1787 medical theatre, pill camera, opticality, panopticality, reflexivity).
The exhibited objects were also numbered; for example, under “.05—In the Flesh—Under the Skin,” one finds “5.31 Ophthalmoscope (c1850, Coccius, Leipzig), Used at the Institute for Blind, Copenhagen,” among other items. So a pseudo (i.e. non-intrinsic) ordering is imposed on everything in the show, a classification system intended to corral the unruly and bring systematic organization to flows, chaos and contradictions. This pseudo-ordering brings about what might be considered a landscape ecology of administration, control, dis/ease and re/lease of an always acculturated body, or bodies. A Foucauldian philosophy—the problematic of the panopticon—is articulated as humans and technologies attempt to come to grips with themselves and one another.
What struck me most about the show was how the relationships between art and technology expressed themselves. The beauty of the included objects and instruments lay in their deep ties to the real, their ability to draw out and communicate information, their functioning-in- the-world. The issue is that their functioning is dictated by the world, not by artistic imperative. They are things that have to work in very specific ways. There is something uncanny about medical instruments, about scientific photography, about works that integrate themselves into the obdurate, inert real. The universe remains per se, no matter what superstructural play occurs. We’ve lost the ability to listen and gained an ability to talk, while the universe always demands immense quiet. At the heart of almost every scientific operation or tool there is silence.
Go into the Cold Room, for example: what you sense above all is the change in temperature. Go into the operating theatre, and your gaze is an inversion of that compelled by the panopticon—it is directed downward, towards a focal point where dissection and other medical procedures occur. Within the exhibition, this space is inverted: a camera reveals the scaffolding beneath the seats; everything hidden is brought to the surface. There’s a map that looks Arakawan, but in fact is a representation of a 1952 polio epidemic in Copenhagen.
What can we say about this kind of uncanny relationship? We have to consider in the first place that the real is absolutely mute. Instrumentality might be considered a form of data mining, turning information into inert and resistant substance. At the other end is organism, interpretation. Information is neither in the world nor outside it; information is empty. Without interpretation, there is no information. Interpretation involves the imparting and construction of meaning, and meaning is always emptying. The uncanny relegates the vulnerable nature of bodies—tissues and organs—to emptiness.
The artifice of art is arbitrary, culturally meandering. Critique, Clement Greenberg notwithstanding, is always after the fact. Nothing catches vision. But the artifice of instrumentality possesses puncta, local frames of reference. How can the appearance of an instrument—which is always arbitrary itself, to some extent—bring forth information that resonates with truth? At the heart of this operation lies abjection, dissuading. Here’s where the uncanny resides, in the tangle of organ and obdurate, truth and artifice, information and decay. Biotech, prosthetics and sequencing, however systematized, are always flows, always pluralities. The exhibition captures this insight in the context of current, future and antique technologies.
What is so clearly revealed here is that the real and virtual worlds are inescapably tangled. On one hand, there are data structures turned into information and further turned into meaning by living subjects. On the other, there are living subjects—fecund ecological, biological and neurophysiological communities that appear as individuals—generating meaning in their very internal and external organization. A sense of these entangled whirlwinds permeates the exhibition.
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