an order of things

8/8/2019 an order of things

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The clinic was the first attempt to order a science on the exercise and decisions of the gaze -

Michel Foucault, The Birth of the Clinic

There is an order of things 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. This phobia or horror that, at the same time, exerts

a kind of cathartic pleasure in its experience, may cause the viewer to reflect on themateriality of their own body.


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Is this art that is merely a materialist interpretation, infantile celebration of bodilyfluids?[1] Can the philosophy of abjection be applied to the anatomical specimen?

Interest in this material swings like a pendulum between the gutter of morbid

fascination and the ponderings of pure knowledge.[2]. The gaze of the viewer

within the transformed gallery moves in the same way between science and religion,

losing the ability that supposedly defines modern man: to separate and distinguish

between these states.


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In The Medical Museum, S.H. Daukes states that the eye must take first place: it is

the main avenue for diagnostic information. Martin Jay notes that, there can be

few human interactions as subtle as the dialectic of the mutual gaze.[3] In the casting

of the face, however, 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. We submit

ourselves to this medical gaze, reclassified by order of anatomo-clinical perception.

Our relationship with our bodies and selves is reflected in the mirror of the

operating theatre. The theatre of medicine becomes the stage, the screen: the

speculum becomes spectacle, the looking-glass of self turned outward. This

narcissistic obsession with faciality may be a denigration of the knowledge of our

mortality - or it may be an attempt to realise it materially.


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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. Here are faces and

eyes, made diseased and necrotic by the rough textures of the materials; rows of heads

colouring and dissolving in unnamed liquids. All these serve to connect the

contemporary concerns of science with an unconscious atavism - a simultaneity of the

pure and the profane.

There must be a point, an interstice, between these modes of seeing, that can be

inferred in the artwork, in the heterotopic space of the museum or gallery. If religion

separates the sublime from the excremental [4], so does symbolic order,

represented by clinical science, also require the expulsion of the abject. 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 are revealed to be synonymous.

Lisa Temple-Cox December 2010


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[1] Benjamin Buchloch The Politics of the Signifier II: A Conversation on the "Informe" and the

AbjectOctober, Vol. 67 (Winter, 1994)

[2] Stephen T. Asma Stuffed Animals and Pickled Heads: the culture and evolution of natural historymuseums (2001) Oxford University Press

[3] Martin Jay Downcast eyes: the denigration of vision in 20C French thought (1994) University ofCalifornia Press.

[4] Alphonso Lingis Chichicastenango in Carolyn Gill (ed) Bataille: writing the sacred (1995)Routledge London

an order of things

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