Post-Specimen Encounters Between Art, Science and Curating
Rethinking Art Practice and Objecthood through Scientific Collections.
Distributed for Intellect Ltd
Post-Specimen Encounters Between Art, Science and Curating
Rethinking Art Practice and Objecthood through Scientific Collections.
Post-Specimen Encounters in Art, Science and Curating examines the ways in which scientific objects held within museums and other collections act as inspiration to contemporary art practices, curating strategies, and their histories. With cross-disciplinary contributions from art historians, artists, poets, anthropologists, critics, and curators, this volume looks at how artistic encounters in museums, ranging from anatomy museums to contemporary cabinets of curiosity, can provoke new modes of thinking.
In particular, this volume draws upon the concept of the specimen—a paradigmatic object in science—as a way of critically investigating these hybrid art–science practices and a means of innovating the practice of art writing itself. Edward Juler and Alistair Robinson bring together a variety of interdisciplinary perspectives from leading specialists in the visual arts that inspire new understandings of the relationships between art, science, and curating.
Table of Contents
Introduction
Edward Juler and Alistair Robinson
1: Narratives of the ‘Fetish’
John Mack
2: Curating Interobjectively in Museums
Alistair Robinson
3: ‘A Readiness to Find What Surrounds Us Strange and Odd’: Objects in the Relational Curiosity Museum
Marion Endt-Jones
4: Art, Science and the Mutant Object
Rahma Khazam
5: Models of Subjectivity: Surrealism, Physics and Psychoanalysis
Gavin Parkinson
6: Glimpsed Phantoms of Sensation: Or, a Psychogeographical Investigation of Various Anatomical Specimens with Reference to Christine Borland’s Cet être-là, c’est à toi de le créer!
Edward Juler
7 … as far back as I will remember
Nadia Lichtig
8: Poetry and the Pathology Museum: A Model of Difference
Christy Ducker
9: The Scientist and the Magician
Irene Brown
10: Choosing, Unpicking and Connecting: On Drawing Museum Objects
Richard Talbot
11: Post-Specimens and Present Ancestors: Passing Fables and Comparative Readings at the Wildgoose Memorial Library
Jane Wildgoose
12: Moving beyond the Specimen (From Drawing Objects to Drawing Processes)
Gemma Anderson
13: Desiccation, Suspension, Extraction: The Inhuman Art of Christine Borland
Andrew Patrizio
Afterword: What’s at Stake?
Ludmilla Jordanova