That
poor dead two-headed baby. Emerged from the womb directly into the
bottle. No name, no brief moment of existence as a person before bam!
into the jar, a thing. Poor thing. A wonder, a monstrosity, a
specimen, but never a person.
I
forget this, sometimes, when I study the specimens I choose to draw.
Four hours in the Hunterian, drawing "skull of a young boy with
a second imperfect skull attached to its anterior fontanelle".
I
post the image thoughtlessly online, proud of my skill, my hand to
eye coordination. A friend and academic, whom I met at a conference
on monstrosity, asks if it is 'the double-headed boy of Bengal'. No,
I say, how can it be? - it is in London. It is specimen P1535. It has
no history to me except for that which I created when I drew it. Her
research produces in short order evidence that it is, in fact, the
remains of the child she mentioned - I look at a painting of the boy,
the little person, and not until then do I begin to wonder at his
short life, and sad death, and the macabre instance that led to his
skull - his little head, removed from his little dead shoulders -
making the journey from India to London where I and innumerable other
curious visitors can gawk at its uncanny asymmetry.
But
still, the skull - the specimen - is not the boy. I still can no more
refer to it as 'he' as I can consider the adjoining specimen - a
deformed calf - as a living being, except to wonder (in the case of
the calf) how such an extraordinarily folded structure might have
looked with skin and flesh still on it. They are become things,
objects of wonder, and I am not the same kind of researcher as my
astute friend, who studies monstrosity and never disassociates the
objects of her study from their lives as beings. Is this indicative
of a horrible lack of empathy on my part? I see the wonder and beauty
and fascination of the abnormal, the gorgeous aesthetic of skeletal
remains made more interesting and fantastic by the departure from the
norm. I don't immediately wonder about the life -or non-life – of
the little creatures before me.
I
like to think - I hope - that this lack of empathy is not just a
callousness come from a selfish
self-obsession
without regard for the feelings of other; from a brutal disconnect
with other living beings that in popular culture so often epitomises
the emotional barrenness of the psychopath, the serial killer.
Rather I hope that my reaction, or lack of reaction, is born of a
lack of this relationship with my own self. I am disconnected from my
self, at sea in terms of identity, accustomed to thinking of myself
as an object, a thing. Poor thing, naughty thing, sweet thing.
Bad
thing.
Maybe
the truth is somewhere in between. My work seems to be about
exploring the intersections of things: the gap between the viewer and
the specimen, separated by the glass of the jar, the doors of the
cabinet, the distance of years. When I draw the 'poor thing' in its
jar, I cross that boundary, that semi-permeable membrane invisible to
the eye, and this process of diffusion has its own effects. I don't
feel pity, or empathy, or sorrow for the life or non-life of the baby
in the jar. I connect, while drawing, very directly with physical
remains. The wrinkled skin on tiny bottled fingers; the delicate
crackling line of the fissures of the skull, meandering across its
terrain like the Colorado river seen from a satellite; the tiny
cluster of whiteheads on the pickled cheek of a Negro man whose
half-head, for reasons unknown and unresearched by me, has come to be
found in a glass pot on the shelf of a cold basement storeroom.
I
don't do the research, follow the paper trail of identity and
information on the origins of this material. I hadn't previously
considered why not; I consider it now, and I still don't know. My
work is not a journey to discover the narratives, the stories and
histories and lives of these half-forgotten former people: I think
that is a job for someone else. What I do is substantively different:
I unpack my relationship with each object into every line I use to
describe it. All those lines, little marks, like text but not text,
tell a story of their own. They tell the story of my relationship
with my own body - its demands, its alien presence, its unnatural
existence here where, somehow, I feel I have no right to exist. They
tell the story of of my disconnection with my own life and sense of
being, of belonging; and perhaps they tell this same story to someone
else. This is not just a drawing of a monster about whose short life
I care to know nothing: this is a drawing of all our short lives, our
deformities, our dysfunctions, our comparisons with perfection that
leave us wanting, our inabilities to achieve what we feel we should
achieve, our failure to live up to someone's high standards, our lack
of self-awareness, self-control, self-worth. Our inability to realise
our own potential may be locked into those tiny scrabbling marks that
skitter across the sketchbook page like the nervous tracks of
short-lived mice.
I
would like to find myself in a small white room, armed with pencils
and charcoal sticks, so that I could take these drawing off the page
and onto those square white walls, cover the walls and floors and
ceilings of that room with these things, these bones and heads and
parts, all the wrong things of nature, collected by men who
themselves had no thought of who they were putting into their
cabinets, only what, and who were so full of themselves and
their right to do so. Of which I am quite glad, because if they did
not, then I would not be here now, selfishly losing myself in the
tiny spaces between that thing, in the cabinet there, and this thing,
me, here.
Well
- if that is the case, does it in fact make me, the artist, complicit
in the grotesque objecthood embodied by the specimens under my gaze?
Or am I merely the recorder of pathologies and teratologies,
alienated from their nature with no role other than to collect and
project an image as clearly as possible, with no intervention? No, if
I were merely a lens, set to reflect this material objectively, I
would use other media than pencil or plaster or clay. The materiality
of the medium affects the objectivity of the gaze: pushing the
plastic matter through my fingers until it takes on the form of a
little homunculus, scratching a pencil across the page until the
shape and dimensions of a solid object begin to emerge - this
articulates my intervention. I am interrogating the object, and
interpreting its form, and something of myself is intersected into
its representation. Something of the specimen goes into or through
me, and something of myself enters it at the same time: art as an
enactment of the Locard principle. There is always an exchange.
Something is left behind, resonating in the brittle light of the
cabinet, the fragile glass of the jar - and something is taken away.
Actually,
upon reflection, my sense of curiosity about the person behind the
specimen seems to be linked very directly with two things: has the
specimen a face, and is it the face of an adult? The two bottled
faces, eaten by horrific cancers, on a low shelf in the Musée
Dupuytren caused me to wonder about the lives of the men they once
were, as did the horribly enucleated half-head in the wet room of the Mütter
Museum. These thoughts still led to no desire to research
their former lives: perhaps creating my own narrative was more
interesting to me than finding the real one. I made a story of the
delicate line of pimples, the raffish beard, the soft, sparse hair
and eyebrows of each of these specimens. It's harder to see a story
in the grinning skull, be it adult or child, and even in the case of
the bottled babies – each recognisable from the next, as I realised
when I saw other artists' drawings of the same specimens, and knew
which collection they could be found in, so distinct are they –
their baby faces told no stories apart from the same one, that of
being born wrong and dying too soon. Their neophytical features seem
too unformed for more than a generalised tale of 'poor thing', all
too quickly replaced with 'strange, deformed thing' and a whole other
set of responses, come to by using chalk and clay and pen. Poor in
identity, rich in meaning: matter translates to matter, and the rest matters not.
All
text and images copyright Lisa Temple-Cox 2014
Image
list:
1: From the Wet Room 1 (Mütter
Museum) charcoal pencil on photo-transfer
2: Skull of a Young Boy (Hunterian Museum) pencil on paper
3: Model of a Wet Specimen (Mütter Museum) clay
4: Teratology Shelf (Musée Dupuytren) watercolour on paper
5: From the Wet Room: half-head (Mütter Museum) pencil on paper
6: Beaded Baby (Museum Boerhaave) pencil on paper
7: Three Bad Babies (Musée Dupuytren) clay, card
8: Bearded Face (Musée Dupuytren) pen on paper
9: Child's Arm holding the Eye's Vascular Tissue (Museum Boerhaave) watercolour pencil on paper
With thanks and apologies to Whitney Dirks-Schuster
So
come September I
sweep the floor, tidy the shelves and benches, put low prices on work
that will never sell at any price, make tea and cake and a happy
face. All day a slow stream of students interrogate me about my
techniques, ladies who paint bore me with theirs, and the idly
curious children and partners of fellow artists poke through my
drawers of bones and scrap. “It's an Aladdin’s cave in here!”
some enthuse, or, more often, “It's a real curiosity cabinet!”.
Every year the same. They like my collections: of bottles, tools,
rusty saws in rows on the wall. Of bones – particularly the drawer
labelled 'badger'. Of broken toys, computer parts, jars of brushes,
trays of insects and beads and shells and stamps and shards... oh,
and they like the box of boxes.
