Image-Text-Object: Practices of Research

An exhibition of doctoral research projects from 

Winchester School of Art

Level 4 Gallery, Hartley Library, University of Southampton.

10^th February - 16^th March 2014

This exhibition presents a series of images, texts and objects, which lead us to think about different ways of seeing, thinking, writing and making. The works on display derive from a range of research projects at Winchester School of Art, University of Southampton. The School is dedicated to the exploration of diverse practices and creative research methods. Studio-based researchers in art and design work alongside those engaged in humanities and social science research, covering areas of art history, critical theory and curatorial practice, as well as the management and marketing of design, media, fashion, and textiles. All researchers at the School are engaged in the critical making of new knowledge: each moving in and out of complex and disciplined modes of activity. Whether it is reading, writing, looking, making, coding, speaking, recording, and much else besides, each are forms of imaginative and critical engagement, developed and extended within the context of a collaborative and inter-disciplinary research community.

Works shown by:

Richard Acquaye, Bedour Aldakhil, Hazel Atashroo & Oliver Peterson Gilbert, Najla Binhalail, Jane Birkin, Rima Chahrour, Ian Dawson, Kate Hawkins, Ben Jenkins, Sunil Manghani, Kay May, Nina Pancheva-Kirkova, Nicky Athina Polymeri, Walter van Rijn, Elham Soleimani, Lisa Temple-Cox, and Simiao Wang.

Practice [ˈpraktɪs] trans. To test experimentally, to put to the test; n. the actual application or use of an idea, belief, or method, as opposed to theories relating to it; v. to perform an activity or exercise a skill repeatedly or regularly in order to acquire, improve or maintain proficiency. ORIGIN late Middle English to mean ‘a way of doing something, method; practice, custom, usage’; also ‘an applied science’ (late 14th Century); similarly from the Old French of practique to mean ‘practice, usage’ (13th Century) and directly from the Medieval Latin practica, meaning ‘practice, practical knowledge’; with the underlying root from the Greek praktike to mean ‘practical’ as opposed to ‘theoretical’. Yet, equally, practice encompasses understanding, relating, for example, to the knowledge of the practical aspect of something, or practical experience, which arguably underpins all forms of enquiry, research and the creation of new knowledge.

“In everyday language we refer to practice as the application or use of an idea, belief or method. For example, we can speak of the principles and practice of teaching. It also means exercising a profession. The lawyer practices law, the doctor practices medicine. We’re familiar with the idea of business practices, which may differ across sectors of an economy and alter over time. Practice can also refer to the premises of a business, such as the doctor or solicitor’s practice. Perhaps most frequently, however, we refer to practice as the repeated exercise of an activity or skill so as to acquire proficiency in it; a child practices a musical instrument and if they complain we gently remind them: ‘Practice makes perfect!’ Practice, then, can mean a customary, habitual, or expected way of doing of something: a technique or set of techniques that end in a particular result (as Aristotle claims for praxis). In the university setting, the practice of a subject, such as law, medicine, art or music, refers not simply to attaining of a certain degree of proficiency, but to becoming situated and expert within a field of study. Furthermore, practice in this sense can refer to speculative endeavours, which allow unexpected outcomes and help challenge established ways of thinking, thus making it both repetition and variations based on and in response to repetition required to hone a skill. The artist’s studio, for example, is a site of sustained practice in making and re-making images and objects of culture. The writer, as a practitioner of words, works and re-works texts in pursuit of new thoughts, images and meaning; while the ethnographer, as participant observer, reports on the knowledge and the system of meanings in the lives of a cultural group, which otherwise remain unarticulated.

As a set of interacting centrifugal and centripetal forces, research practices – simultaneously and paradoxically – take us toward and away from disciplined ways of understanding and fashioning the world we inhabit. We look, ponder, write and make; always prompting practical forms, engagements, and processes. To decouple the misconstrued, yet persistent divide of practice/theory, we might usefully pair the Greek praktike not with a single term for theory, but two philosophical terms: theoria (contemplation) and theoros (participation), the latter emphasizing an act of witness and participation in an event or activity. Together these terms help us consider a more fluid notion of theory and practice, whereby the two become inextricably intertwined and one impossible without the other. In experiencing an artwork, for example, theoria helps conceptualise the interface between art and its viewer. The artwork does not possess an intrinsic ‘truth’ claim, but does have a claim upon us – at its simplest, the artwork demands it be considered an artwork, to which the viewer must respond, even if the response is to deny it such status. The artwork, then, places us immediately into both a practice of thinking and a thinking of practice.”

Sunil Manghani 2014

Private View 13^th February 5pm – 7.30pm

As I have only recently begun this programme of practice-based research, I will be showing an installation combined of elements created during and after my MA, provisionally titled 'An Order of Things: False Membranes'.

"There is a symbolic order within the conceptual architecture of a space that exists, in potentia, in both clinic and altar. What is the relationship between these systems? Both have relevance to our exploration of self, during which we invariably encounter something primal, unconscious, alongside the scientific – here represented by the supposedly objective medical gaze. We use art in our search for self, and art uses media that not only signify the body – flesh, blood, faeces -­ but invoke a sense of the abject: a separation of subject from object, a rejection of death. The aesthetic of the medical museum and its exhibits may have similar psychological effects on its visitors, containing specimens that simultaneously attract and repulse. In the casting of the face the eyes of necessity remain closed, thus blurring the distinction between life mask and death mask, in much the same way that the preserving fluid and curve of the glass jar further distorts the teratological specimen.

Our relationship with our bodies and selves is reflected in the mirror of the operating theatre. The theatre of medicine becomes the stage: the speculum becomes spectacle, the looking-glass of self turned outward. The work shown is a visual exploration not only of the way in which the museum specimen can seem to reflect, in some measure, residues of the human, but return the gaze of the spectator to create a deeper reflection of self: from object to abject, self to other, and back. Here, the artist becomes both subject and object. The eyeless faces, made diseased and necrotic by the rough textures of the materials, serve to connect the contemporary concerns of anatomy with an unconscious atavism – a simultaneity of the pure and the profane. There is a realm of sympathetic magic in the territory between form and misform: somewhere in these anachronistic juxtapositions of scientific paraphernalia and animistic object, the clinic and alter may be revealed to be synonymous." 

                                                                                                                     

Poor Things

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