On a recent trip to the Wellcome Collection I took the opportunity to visit the excellent permanent collections which comprise exhibitions and artwork themed around modern medicine, as well as the literal cabinet of curiosity that is Henry Wellcome’s personal collection of artefacts and medicinal aperatus.  

I was fascinated by an installation on the discovery of DNA, and particularly the way in which the genetic code was recorded, as the collection houses a paper copy of the complete DNA code for one person.  High shelves hold almost 100 large binders, each filled with double-sided paper, and every sheet is completely filled with the strings of letters that make up the genetic code.  This exhibit is called ‘Library of the Genome’ and contains 3 billion characters which would take around 56 years to recite aloud.  

I was struck by the complexity of the DNA code and was amazed that such a huge amount of it corresponded to just one person.  But the most interesting aspect of the exhibit for me was the possibility that a human being could be archived like any other artefact in the Wellcome Collection.  Can a person be recorded and stored through their genetic code?  There is certainly something evocative about seeing DNA written down on paper, and rather than being reductive, I found the exhibit profound and elegiac.


Stephanie Fuller

Last week film-maker Jenny Coan came to speak to the Autopsies Research Group about her work with film archives and found footage.

Her short films made for Bill Ryder-Jones and his recent album release party have taken on a life of their own and reached the attention of the New York Times.

Each film brings together footage from archival material to create an evocative interpretation of a song from the Ryder-Jones album 'If...', his soundtrack to the Italo Calvino novel If on a Winter's Night a Traveler.

Coan purposefully did not look to the novel for inspiration; rather, she took her cues from the sounds, rhythms, and tempos of each Ryder-Jones track and produced her own 'orchestral' arrangement of moving images.

But Coan's films are more than visual accompaniments to the musical material and move the viewer through a series of witty and wonderful storylines that collapse and come together with Coan's masterful direction. Take a look and have a listen here.

MCM

The Old Curiosity Shop, by Myles Birket Foster (1882)


To mark the bicentenary of the birth of Charles Dickens (7 February 1812), events and exhibitions have been organised all around Britain and abroad.

As part of the celebration of Dickens and Dickensiana, the
Autopsies Research Group announces its investigation into The
Afterlife of Dickens Objects. This project places the emphasis on the household items and everyday objects that appear in Dickens's texts and in curated exhibits of Dickens's life.


For a look at some of these objects visit these ongoing events:

The British Library

The Dickens Museum

The Museum of London

Dickens House Museum, Broadstairs

Victoria and Albert Museum

List of worldwide events

Guest blog by Edwina Attlee

In the 1980s there were over twelve thousand launderettes in the UK, today there are less than three thousand. As part of my research into homes away from home in the city I am looking at these seemingly obsolete spaces and asking questions about our experience of using them. In a world where the emptying out of our insides (on social networking platforms such as Facebook or Twitter) seems to be perfectly acceptable behaviour, it is worth looking at one of the first places in which we washed our dirty linen in public.

The launderette (and by extension, the spaces crossed by washing-lines) exemplify the mixing of private and public and inside with outside. When we make a trip to the launderette, we engage in a process of carrying-out, from the home to the public space, the most intimate and bodily items that city-dwellers own. These worn, dirty, and personal fabrics travel outside the house to be cleaned; they cross the boundary between privacy and exposure.

In spite of being a space of possible exposure, the experience of using a launderette is often pleasurable; it is a cosy-exposure. Launderettes are warm, soapy, humming spaces where you are often left alone for an hour or two with just the machines and the spinning clothes to keep you company. They are technical spaces, and spaces of necessity, but they also occupy a space like Pierre Mayol’s neighbourhood, a space that is neither entirely public nor completely domestic. The launderette is a space of waiting; of idling, daydreaming and thinking. It is a space of space. Mayol writes that the home and neighbourhood “are the only places where in different ways one can do what one wants.”

There are other spaces in the city which combine the functionality and irrationality of the home. The launderette is an irrational space because it elongates and subverts the space-time relationship normally at work in the city – this is the relationship characterised by the commute to work; the crossing of the farthest distance in the smallest amount of time. As such this home away from home may also function as a space of absence, a space for daydreaming. Michel de Certeau writes: “I read and I daydream, my reading is thus an impertinent absence.” In the everyday reading of the city the launderette allows for a kind of delinquency. 

Edwina Attlee


References

Pierre Mayol, ‘The Neighbourhood’, The Practice of Everyday Life, Vol.2. Living and Cooking (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1998), p.11.

Michel de Certeau, ‘Reading as Poaching’, The Practice of Everyday Life (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988) p.173.

The Bridge Over the Moat, Anonymous, 1896, silver gelatin print with original graphite retouching


EXHIBITION REVIEW

Haunting the Chapel: Photography and Dissolution
Daniel Blau Gallery, London
1 September - 6 October 2011


At its invention, photography was considered otherworldly: the stuff of ghosts. The spirit photographs of the late nineteenth century exemplified this impression of the ethereal, as haunting figures were made to appear within portraits after the discovery in the 1860s of the effects of double exposure by William Mumler. ‘Haunting the Chapel: Photography and Dissolution’ exposes these spirits of photography through a cross-century selection of altered, or altering, images. Besides original examples of spirit photography - including one of Arthur Conan Doyle, who wrote a pamphlet defending the veracity of the medium - the exhibition features x-ray images, photograms, silver prints and cyanotypes, documenting as much the dissolution involved in photography’s very processes as the disintegrating nature of its subjects. 

The skeleton of a building on the ‘Rue du Bac’ sits between decay and demolition. Nadar’s ‘Foyer of the Paris Opera after Burning in 1884’ is deserted and still; elsewhere an anonymous building is licked with flames. There are Gothic cathedral exteriors and ornate, but empty interiors. A dilapidated stairwell from 1870 disorients like Escher, with unperceivable depths. The intricacies of a ‘Mandalay Palace’ (c. 1890) are eaten away by black patterns. Ancient gardens tangled with plants and palms appear in the travel photography of Emile Gsell (1838 - 1879), the first to represent on film the temples of Vietnam and Cambodia. Architectural juxtaposition occurs between a silver print of New York’s 1920s skyline and black and white vernacular images of rural farms, or the bunker-like dwellings of volcanic ‘Stromboli’. U.S. Army aerial shots show the gridded city lights of 'Toyama, Honshu’, or the spiralling smoke of an Oil Refinery that has just exploded. These last images are haunting for their purpose in recording, their documentation of destruction, which appears, from a distance, abstracted. 

Such pieces of early photography sit alongside more recent works - a freckled portrait of Berenice Abbott by Walker Evans, or a Chris Marker still in which the side of a man’s face on roadside concrete is cut diagonally by a falling jet of water. But it is the early specimens, often anonymous, that are mysteriously compelling--discovered, you imagine, upon abandoned desks. The exhibition represents that which is about to be lost, or those who already have been, teetering on the point of disappearance, knocking at the door of the atrocious or the alienated, holding the hand of the fragile. The curators have chosen to frame the exhibition a quote from Borges's ‘The Immortal’: ‘They are moving because of their phantom condition; every act they execute may be their last; there is not a face that is not on the verge of dissolving like a face in a dream’. With the long exposure times of photography’s early technologies, bodies in Italian piazzas or French town squares have become almost-extinguished silhouettes. Kinetic blur jolts the just-frozen moment, and the fall of the shutter fails to quite capture the movement of figures in time.

Hannah Gregory

EXHIBITION: 15 August - 4 September 2011
Tristan Bates Theatre, 1A Tower St, London WC2H 9NP

The Museum of Broken Relationships is an award winning exhibition of seemingly ordinary yet incredibly poignant objects. Donated by individuals from all over the world, each object tells the story of a past relationship.

More information from Tristan Bates Theatre.

FILM SCREENING: 22 August 2011
Opera Holland Park, London

A Summer Celebration of Iranian Film will include cultural exhibitions and an outdoor screening of The Song Of Sparrows (dir. Majid Majidi).

For more more information and details of the forthcoming 2nd London Iranian Film Festival see the UKIFF website.

No guesses at what type of building dominates the Warehouse district in New Orleans. Today, however, there is no trace of industry in the area, which is slowly being populated with art galleries, boutique hotels and residential loft conversions. As the district awaits further gentrification, a number of abandoned buildings stand to preserve the last memories of a working-class past. 

The (currently empty) New Orleans Orpheum Theater

In between the Warehouse District and French Quarter lies the American Sector. From the 1910s to the 1960s, this area was the heart of the New Orleans jazz scene. Once the centre of jazz performance, publishing, recording and broadcasting, the area has almost entirely lost its once buzzing musical life. Many key venues in Jazz history are now dollar stores or hotels. Other buildings lie in abandon, dreaming of their illustrious past. Other places faced the wrecker's ball long ago.

Saenger Theater

According the large sign above the entrance, the grand opening of the Saenger Theater is promised for 2011. Unfortunately there was little evidence of work or a new tenant during my visit.


Next post: Post-Modernism's shrine.