Welcome to the dolls’ hair house

The former London home of Sigmund and Anna Freud, now the Freud Museum, is enveloped in a cats cradle of rope made of dolls’ hair. Standing as it does on a prosperous suburban street of imposing redbrick villas, the bound house looks like a scene from a dream itself, a dream of home denied. Such dreams are typically untangled on a therapeutic descendant of the very couch that sits inside the museum; the fairytale Rapunzel tress-ropes also suggest the kind of psychological decoding of myth and culture that Freud indulged in.

Alice Anderson’s ‘Childhood Rituals’ invades the inside of Freud’s home too. Balls of doll’s hair, looms and figurines invade the rooms of artefacts; in Freud’s study itself the hair is spun into a web through which visitors are forced to regard the domestic interior. Anderson’s work refers to childhood trauma, re-enacting the neurotic pulling of dolls; hair that she would perform as a child when left alone by her mother.

Anderson studied with Christian Boltanski, an artist whose work frequently references the structure and display of museums and archives, who appears in both Kynaston McShine’s Museum as Muse and James Putnam’s Art and Artifact. However, as an intervention in a museum space, Anderson’s work seems to have moved on from the practices of institutional critique where the work’s critical relationship is to the gallery or museum that frames it. Anderson’s work instead relates directly to the subject matter of the museum (that is, the psychoanalytic interpretation of everyday life).

The Freud Museum is modestly sized as a museum, yet has an established track record of artistic exhibitions and intervention that supplement the object displays. This actually isn’t all that atypical for object-based museums these days. While the orthodox view of museum collections continues to be that ‘objects tell stories’ (a curious misascription of agency: it’s rather that we tell stories about objects) many object-based museums (that is, not art galleries) are increasingly looking to contemporary artists to do something for them. What is that something that they are doing?

‘Medical London’, Flickr, and the photography of everyday medicine

Saw, by David Edwards on Flickr

This is the text of a long abstract for a presentation given at the 15th biannual conference of the European Association of Museums for the History of Medical Sciences (EAMHMS), “Contemporary Medical Science and Technology as a Challenge for Museums” in Copenhagen on 16 September 2010. The original abstract included images; I have replaced them here with links to Flickr for convenience.

The explosion of digital photography in the last ten years has had an enormous impact on the practice of taking pictures. Digital cameras have made possible the production of a vastly increased number of personal photographs while the internet has provided practically unbounded means of access and distribution through photo-sharing websites like Flickr.

In 2010 Wellcome Collection set up a Flickr pool on the theme of ‘Medical London’ as an extension of our existing off/online Medical London project. In itself, this is no innovation: as Romeo and Waterson have noted, the Flickr pool is “a well-established museum outreach genre”[1]. It is no accident that Flickr is the photo-sharing website of choice for cultural heritage institutions. Where Facebook situates photography in a social aspect and Google’s Picasa excels in desktop integration, Flickr, and Flickr users, emphasise the aesthetic content of photographs themselves.

However, outreach is usually as far as museums’ Flickr projects go. Success is frequently measured by quantitative criteria (participation, entries) rather than any critical or curatorial measure. Although Galani and Moschovi contend that “contemporary amateur photographs as generated and published through social media applications have increasingly captured the curatorial imagination”[2] this has so far mostly been limited to curators and exhibitors working in the area of photography itself. Though the “internet stew” of photo-sharing websites like Flickr may be exactly where “the museum’s curatorial function is sorely lacking” according to Fred Ritchin[3], few non-photographic museums seem to have considered in detail what they might take, examine or curate from Flickr itself.

If photography has become pervasive, medicine always has been: a constant part of our lives both personally and socially. Photography might also have a therapeutic aspect: preserving the moment of life forever, where medicine ultimately fails. The Medical London pool, offering a theme both concrete and open, offers an opportunity to see where photography and medicine intersect. It is sufficiently local to attract what might be a community; there are enough potential subjects to avoid repetition. What follows is an attempt to use this pool to draw out some of the subjects, aesthetics and perspectives that might be of use to a medical museum in understanding and re-presenting everyday medicine. Six subject areas or possible approaches to the material are explored with examples.

In preparing this paper I’ve taken into account both the legal aspects of licensing on Flickr (only photos appropriately licensed or for which specific permission was given are included here: URLs for complete galleries are given alongside the pictures). I’ve also considered intentionality by only including images whose creators placed them in the pool, which suggests that they considered (however minimally) that the picture has a medical aspect, and can be understood by others in a medical context.

1. Objects

Through the Flickr pool we have access to images of objects which the museum does not possess. Pictures of hospital badges belonging to healthcare workers, medical instruments, charity boxes and large pieces of medical equipment have all been submitted to the pool. Where online we often consider a gallery of photographic images of objects to constitute meaningful access to our own collections, we might ask now whether it is possible to curate and present others’ images of objects.

Objects gallery

2. Location

Geospatial coordinates are an increasingly common property of photographs. Whether applied using Flickr’s map tools, or added by a GPS-aware mobile device, many pictures in  the Medical London pool include information about where they were taken. On the map below, each pink dot represents one of the images in the strip, plotted onto the place where it was taken. If embedded in a form accessible to a mobile device, the potential exists to turn the city itself into a museum of its own medical history: from every location we can access nearby significant buildings, objects and events.

Interactive map

3. Documenting surgery

David Edwards documented his own bunion surgery in February 2007. As podiatric surgeons worked on his foot, a student podiatrist took pictures using Edwards’ camera. Here, the procedural becomes personal and while the foot remains the site of the operation, the subjectivity of the photography changes subtly: the pictures of the operation are authored by the patient.

Surgery gallery

4. Protest

Medicine has a social dimension, and even socialised healthcare in Europe is not simply a static service in which medics provide care to patients. A restructuring of services can spark protests by both healthcare workers and the local community. Here, the Flickr pool helps to provide a record of the dynamics of a changing health service in London.

Protest gallery

5. Other cures

Living in a multicultural city reminds us that ‘Western Medicine’ is no longer a primarily geographical category. The evidence of Chinese medicine, herbalism, homeopathy and other cures is everywhere in street photography, sometimes deliberately, sometimes accidentally. The ‘health food’ store is a sight as common as a pharmacy; while all cures might not be equal or even reputable, they all form a part of a medical landscape.

Other cures gallery

6. A new aesthetic: the empty hospital

The image of the hospital’s interior is familiar: wide corridors interrupted by fire doors; staff in uniform, patients in gowns and visitors in everyday dress; trolleys and other medical equipment. In the Flickr pool, through a combination of artists, healthcare workers, and ‘urban explorers’ investigating abandoned buildings, we unexpectedly discover a new aesthetic. The hospital, its spacious areas now bare, takes on an eerie feeling, like an empty diorama.

Empty hospitals gallery

Having seen its variety and considered its content, we might usefully ask in what ways the Medical London Flickr pool materially differs from a traditional photographic archive. Firstly, it is ongoing and open, offering a wide variety of subjects and modes, and few restrictions on submissions. Secondly, it is multiply authored, by both amateur and professional photographers. Thirdly, it can be collaboratively curated: galleries selected from it like the ones above can be made by anyone. Lastly, linked only by a strong but mutable idea, ‘Medical London’ photographs are open to constant reinterpretation by the photographers, the museum and others. As a nascent community it has yet to (and may never) develop any shared senses of photographic priorities. But the most important aspect of the pool is its capacity to offer us surprises: to see new subjects, aesthetics and understandings in what is offered to us.

If we wish to re-present these surprises to our audiences, how might we integrate the medical Flickr pool into the medical museum itself? In one way we already have, simply by connecting its online content to our existing presence: we are already used to museum exhibitions and projects having many limbs. If we wished to physically integrate these images into the museum, we might install a screen that dynamically highlights recent additions to the pool, as the Denver Art Museum does[4]. Or we might display the winners of a competition hosted by Flickr and integrate comments from Flickr into gallery interpretations, as the National Maritime Museum has[5].

Flickr has already proved to be highly effective at attracting audience engagement with the subject matter and collections of the museum. The curatorial question for museums now is how to engage with what audiences have produced. For a medical museum in particular, the challenge is how to find fresh perspectives from the mass of available material that we could loosely describe as ‘everyday medicine’. The ultimate result, however, will not be something that the museum has acquired, but rather something that it has fostered and shared.

Websites

www.flickr.com/groups/medicallondon

www.medicallondon.org

www.wellcomecollection.org

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank all the individually credited Flickr users for permission to use their photos in this paper, whether granted personally or through the use of Creative Commons licences.

References

[1]Romeo, F. and N. Waterson, ‘Flickr as Platform: Astronomy Photographer of the Year’. In J. Trant and D. Bearman (eds). Museums and the Web 2010: Proceedings. Toronto: Archives & Museum Informatics. Published March 31, 2010. Consulted July 12, 2010. http://www.archimuse.com/mw2010/papers/romeo/romeo.html

[2] Galani, Areti and Moschovi, Alexandra (2010) ‘Trans/forming Museum Narratives: The Accommodation of “Photography 2.0″ in Contemporary Exhibitions’ in Transforming Culture in the Digital Age International Conference 2010: Proceedings. Consulted July 12, 2010. http://dspace.utlib.ee/dspace/handle/10062/14768

[3] Ritchin, Fred. After Photography. W. W. Norton & Co., 2008. p 115

[4] ‘Progressive photography policy’, photograph on Flickr  flickr.com/dannybirchall/4539113403

[5] Romeo, F. and N. Waterson, 2010

Museum Cultures Symposium

Museum Cultures Symposium
Department of History of Art and Screen Media, School of Arts, Birkbeck

Friday 12 March 2010

Annie Coombes introduced the symposium and the Birkbeck MA in Museum Cultures, focusing on three recent innovations in museum cultures themselves: digital experimentation, commemorating genocide and museums as social and community agents. Her own work focuses somewhere between the latter two: she highlighted some contrasts between popular and successful South African site museums, and the emergence of Kenyan ‘peace museums’. In South Africa, at Robben Island, where a national liberation narrative is presented in the context of a place where significant events took place. At Robben Island, tours are frequently given by former prisoners, but their narrative privileges the role of the ANC at the cost of the PAC or Black Consciousness Movement.

Peace museums, very small collections of artifacts and media, often housed in only one room, have emerged in Kenya as part of reconciliation efforts since the post-electoral violence of 2008, but she highlighted the Lari peace museum, built in a location where longstanding social divisions between former Mau Mau and former members of the Kanya Home Guard went back to a traumatic event in the national liberation struggle. Such museums, she argued, through their presentation and reinforcement of fragmentary lived experience, for a local audience, provided an alternative to the grander and less subtle narratives of national liberation embodied in places like Robben Island.

Gabriel Koureas discussed the foundation of the Imperial War Museum through its first director, Sir Martin Conway, and his attitudes to mountaineering, masculinity and the appreciation of the beauty of art. Like the ICA, the IWM was at first peripatetic, finding host venues for its exhibitions, the first of which was held at Crystal Palace in 1920. Its didn’t acquire its current home, a former hospital with a trademark psychiatric panopticon structure, until the 1930s. Conway’s concern was the assertion of masculinity & individuality against the suburbanisation of everyday life, and he considered art, like sport, to be a necessary and vital part of human life. The history of war through the presentation of objects (rather than say through memoirs, like that of ambulance worker W M Floyd) replaced war’s literal and traumatic connection with working class male masculinity (in that their purpose was to be operated by young working class men to kill other young working class men) with an aestheticised relationship in which their appreciation formed part of acquiring the previously aristocratic possession of taste.

Pat Simpson presented part of her ongoing research into the State Darwin museum in Moscow, and its relationship to Darwinism and soviet science. Founded in 1907 by Aleksandr Kots, the museum uses a combination of art, taxidermy and objects to engage visitors with evolutionary science. Darwinism as an evolutionary theory was identified with the radical left before the revolution, and enjoyed favour in the initial Bolshevik period. The museum was called on to provide evidence of microevolution in the diversity of animal furs when the rouble had collapsed and fur was one of the USSR’s few reliable currency-generating exports. Mendelian Darwinism lost favour from the thirties with the emergence of a Lysenkoist model of evolution that harked back to Lamarck, and the inheritance of acquired characteristics (vernal wheat and a remade Homo Sovieticus). The objects, however, from stuffed elephants to sculptures of primitive man, having no inherent truths, were simply rearranged to represent prevailing theories. Since 1989, the museum has acquired a new building and an apparent rapprochement with orthodox Darwinism.

Fiona Candlin, editor of The Object Reader discussed the decline of handling objects, and tactual associations with connoisseurship as function of curation during the last two centuries. Beginning with diary evidence of eighteenth century visitors to museums handling objects, she worked forwards to the late twentieth century when handling objects becomes an ‘access’ activity for ‘non-traditional’ (read working class) audiences at the same time as contemporary art moves away from the (touchable) object and into performance and relationally aesthetic work. The recognised virtue of connoisseurship, heavily dependent on touch and associated with the white cotton gloves of an expert depended on the integration of intellectual and technical knowledge, the kind of knowledge necessary to tell real from fake objects. Its decline was less due to the postmodern academic deconstruction of connoisseurship itself then with the expansion of the UK’s higher education system, the increase in students studying museum subjects and distance learning, all factors which made intimacy with objects less possible. The closure of the Museums Association diploma and professionalisation of museum jobs also distanced the intellectual appreciation of objects from their practical handling.

During the Tory era, when cultural heritage organisations were expected to produce popular blockbuster shows, the V&A took the lead in separating cultural knowledge and expertise from collections management, a practice that has now become the norm. After the Labour victory of 1997, commercialisation was renounced, but social inclusion and education were prioritised, with a corresponding de-emphasis on the inherently tasteful knowledge of the ‘curatorial caste’. Curatorship has moved into a kind of showmanship; Frieze magazine has compared curators to film directors, artists, editors, authors and CEOs; meanwhile the title of ‘curator’ is applied to many other activities such as programming (most of which involve some kind of selection): intimate knowledge of objects is no longer its characteristic. Opening objects to handling by the public suggests a corresponding transfer of ownership: museum collections now ‘belong’ to us, but a simultaneous emphasis on the visual creates a more democratic picture of museums, because the sight of objects is equal to all.

Silke Arnold-de Simine discussed the phenomenon of DDR Museums, and their relationship to memories of everyday life. The memorial landscape of the DDR is divided between memorials to oppression, and displays and collections around everyday life in the DDR, a country which effectively ceased to exist in 1989. She concentrated on two examples, the commercial DDR Museum, a visitor attraction in Berlin, and the Documentation Centre of everyday Culture in the DDR, both of which seek to create some sort of picture of life in the DDR separate from a commemoration or preservation of the mechanics of the oppressive regime itself. Both are controversial to some extent for their concentration on ‘ostalgie’ (the culture that fetishises objects like ampelmännchen), but claim to deal with the gap between personal memory and political cultural memory. The two institutions differ: while the DDR Museum caters to international visitors, the Documentation Centre aims for a more comprehensive picture of diversity through catalogued objects and associated donors’ stories. There is room for a ‘reflective nostalgia’  which also functions in some ways as a critique of post-Wende German capitalism.