Observatory's First Birthday and Lecture, this Thursday, April Fools Day!

This Thursday, April 1st (April Fools Day! Yes, we know, and no, this is not a trick!) we at Observatory will be celebrating our 1st birthday with a party and a lecture. Come early--the evening will begin at 7:00--to enjoy DJ Davin Kuntze spinning 78s on his Victrola and your first glass(es) of wine. At 8, we will file into Observatory for David Suisman's lecture "The Birth of the Music Industry: Phonographs, Song Factories, and the Selling of Sound" (see below for details). Stick around for the free after-party, and enjoy DJ Platterhead (aka music journalist John Swenson) spinning from his incredible collection of 45s. And, of course, there will be drinks. Many of them.

Hope to see you there!

The Birth of the Music Industry: Phonographs, Song Factories, and the Selling of Sound
A reading and illustrated lecture by David Suisman, followed by Observatory's 1st birthday party celebration!
Date: Thursday, April 1 (April Fools Day. Yes, we know!)
Time: 8:00 PM (Music and drinks begin at 7:00 PM)
Admission: $5

***Happy First Birthday, Observatory! To celebrate, come early (7:00 PM) and enjoy antique melodies played at 78 rpm on DJ Davin Kuntze's old Victrola, accompanied by drinks. Following the lecture, please join us for a party featuring drinks, snacks, and the sound stylings of DJ Platterhead (aka music journalist John Swenson), spinning vintage 45s from his own collection. Admission to party is free. Please Note: This is NOT an April Fools prank. There will really, truly be a party! And a lecture. Hope to see you there.

We are immersed in music. We hear it virtually everywhere, from cars to restaurants to airports, not to mention the mobile sounds that reach our ears via iPods and ringtones. This is not a “natural” state of affairs, a simple by-product of people’s love for melody. Rather, this musical culture was created a century ago, David Suisman will show, when the modern music industry took shape. From Tin Pan Alley to grand opera, player-pianos to phonographs, the rise of the music business lay the foundations of today’s aural world and produced many of the ideas and assumptions we hold about music today.

In his acclaimed new book Selling Sounds: The Commercial Revolution in American Music, Suisman explores the formation in the early twentieth century of a radically new musical culture, driven by new products, technologies, and commercial strategies to incorporate music into the daily rhythm of modern life. Popular songs filled the air with a new kind of musical pleasure, phonographs brought opera into the parlor, and celebrity performers like Enrico Caruso captivated the imagination of consumers nationwide. In tonight’s lecture and reading, Suisman will uncover the origins of this new kind of culture industry and chronicle how music ignited an auditory explosion that still reverberates today.

***

David Suisman’s first book Selling Sounds: The Commercial Revolution in American Music was published in 2009 by Harvard University Press. It appeared on numerous year-end Top Ten lists and was named a Choice Outstanding Academic Title of 2009. He is also co-editor (with Susan Strasser) of Sound in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2009). His articles have appeared in The Believer, Social Text, the Journal of American History and other publications. He is also an occasional disc jockey at WFMU and an assistant professor of history at the University of Delaware. He lives in Philadelphia.

You can get directions to Observatory--which is next door to the Morbid Anatomy Library--by clicking here. You can find out more about Observatory here, join our mailing list by clicking here, and join us on Facebook by clicking here.

Image: "Edison Phonograph magazine ad from around October of 1904, depicting a two-minute cylinder record-playing phonograph." Via Carolina History Project.

"Obstetric Tables: Comprising Graphic Illustrations, with Descriptions and Practical Remarks..." George Spratt, 1833

In 1538, Vesalius created Tabulae Sex, attaching a second printed image on top of the first that could be lifted to show the inside and outside of the human body. Euclid’s Elements of Geometry in 1570 incorporated flaps to help the reader envision three dimensional objects (Ex Oversize 2654.331.570q). By the early nineteenth century, the British printmaker George Spratt (ca. 1784-1840) used the same overlay technique for an anatomy atlas entitled Obstetric Tables. Spratt’s volume, first published in London in 1833, includes fifty hand-colored, tipped on flaps, sometimes layered four or five to the same image...

Find out more on Princeton University's Graphic Arts blog--from which all text and images are drawn--by clicking here.

Pictured above: George Spratt, Obstetric Tables: Comprising Graphic Illustrations, with Descriptions and Practical Remarks: Exhibiting on Dissected Plates Many Important Subjects in Midwifery (Philadelphia: James A. Bill, 1850). Lithographs. Gift of Joseph V. Meigs, Class of 1915. Graphic Arts GAX 2010. In process

Morbid Anatomy Presents at Observatory: "Modern Ruins, Urban Archaeology, and the Post-Industrial Sublime" Tonight!

Tonight, Morbid Anatomy Presents at Observatory: "Modern Ruins, Urban Archaeology, and the Post-Industrial Sublime." This event--a series of presentations followed by a panel discussion on the allure of The Ruin--has generated a lot of interest, including this Flavorpill mention, so please come early to ensure seating. Hope to see you there!

Modern Ruins, Urban Archaeology, and the Post-Industrial Sublime: Presentations by Ian Ference, Tarikh Korula, and Julia Solis, followed by a discussion moderated by Alan Rapp
Date: Tonight, March 25th, 2010
Time: 8:00 PM
Admission: $5

Ruins as an aesthetic category were born in the eighteenth century, and they continue to seduce and thrill the contemporary imagination. But rather than antiquity’s shattered agorae or the stripped medieval abbeys that littered the English countryside, the ruins that captivate us today are of the relatively recent past—not just the industrial era that established Western hegemony, but now an even more recent service/retail age that dominated American culture until the crash of the late 00s.

A few dedicated individuals are committed to investigating and documenting this ruinous legacy. These intrepid photographer-researchers infiltrate a variety of hidden and abandoned sites, often risking physical danger or arrest, to capture and share stirringly uncanny photographs expressing the grandeur and pathos of these majestically crumbling spaces.

On March 25th, join a panel of photographers and aficionados of the post-industrial sublime for a discussion that will explore the allure and fascination of visiting, photographing, and viewing these mysterious spaces. The evening will begin with a series of short presentations about the history and photography of The Modern Ruin. Following these presentations, moderator Alan Rapp will lead a discussion that will seek to explore the art, history, and culture of The Ruin and its depiction, from ancient examples to these modern ruins that span the abandoned lunatic's asylum and tuberculosis wards, decrepit factory complexes and dead shopping malls. We will also probe the question of “why now,” with a special eye towards the acceleration of history which can make a ruin of sites as recent as a shopping mall, and ask if this contemporary fascination might speak to us of the twilight of our own empire.

Alan Rapp is a visual book editor and writer on the topics of architecture, photography, and design. He blogs at Critical Terrain and is currently completing his MFA in Design Criticism at School of Visual Arts.

Ian Ference has been discovering and traversing abandoned buildings for a decade and a half; sometime in the early 2000s, he decided to teach himself photography in order to capture the disappearing structures. He is particularly fascinated by insane asylums and quarantine hospitals, both for their uniquely purposed architecture and for the particular threads of history they embody. Ian's work has been widely featured, notably in the Brooklyn Museum and the New York Daily News. He has recently begun sharing his work online in a blog, The Kingston Lounge.

Tarikh Korula is a multidisciplinary artist whose work has included composition, performance, hacking, and sculpture. His practice is a playful meditation on experimental, political, sensuous, dark, or absurd themes. For the past decade, Korula has been exploring sound through improvisation, field recording and handmade electronics. He has performed at PS1 Contemporary Art Center and his sculpture has been exhibited at the New Museum. Korula was a founding member of the New York City Independent Media Center and has written for Punk Planet and Make Magazine. Korula co-founded Uncommon Projects in 2005 and lives in New York.

Julia Solis conducts archaeological parlor games and investigates ruined urban spaces. As the founder of Dark Passage, she started the creative preservation group Ars Subterranea in 2002 with the object of staging scavenger hunts and exhibitions in unusual locations in New York. She is an officer of the Madagascar Institute and Place in History, the locations producer of the film /American Ruins/, a co-founder of Furnace Press, and recipient of a fellowship from the New York Foundation for the Arts. Publications include New York Underground: The Anatomy of a City (Routledge, 2004) and Scrub Station (Koja Press, 2002).

You can get directions to Observatory--which is next door to the Morbid Anatomy Library--by clicking here. You can find out more about Observatory here, join our mailing list by clicking here, and join us on Facebook by clicking here.

Photo: "Still from 'Stages of Decay' by Julia Solis

"Remember That You Will Die: Death Across Cultures," Rubin Museum, Through August 9th, 2010

Eerie personifications of death greet the visitor in the form of two pairs of sculptures of skeleton figures: weathered lindenwood figures from 17th-century Germany extend bony, beckoning hands, while macabre bronzes from Tibet portray a yogic brother and sister engrossed in a mad dance—as skin peels off like furled ribbons. Both sculptural pairs warn of the fleeting nature of life: in the Western tradition, as memento mori, and in the Tibetan Buddhist tradition, as an incentive to make diligent use of precious human rebirth...

I just found out about an excellent sounding exhibition on view through August 9th at the Rubin Museum in New York City. Entitled "Remember That You Will Die: Death Across Cultures," the exhibition seeks to explore the "fascinating parallels and significant differences in the depiction of death over the centuries...focusing on works of art from Medieval and Early Renaissance Europe and Tibet."

It seems that the curators for this exhibition have cast a refreshingly broad net in their search for artifacts; the exhibition includes objects drawn from the American Museum of Natural History, London's Wellcome Collection, the Harvard Museum or Art and the New York Public Library as well as from the Rubin's permanent collection. I am incredibly curious to see this show and hope to see more broad, multi-disciplinary shows like this one in this museum's future!

Full details, from the press release:

Remember That You Will Die: Death Across Cultures
The Rubin Museum of Art finds fascinating parallels and significant differences in the depiction of death over the centuries in "Remember That You Will Die," an exhibition focusing on works of art from Medieval and Early Renaissance Europe and Tibet.

Serving as memento mori (death remembrances), the 84 works of art and artifacts on view range from a 12th-century be-jeweled bronze reliquary arm from Belgium to a wooden club carved into the shape of a skeleton from Tibet. The one contemporary work, a video by the American artist Bill Viola entitled The Three Women, is being exhibited in New York for the first time.

Eerie personifications of death greet the visitor in the form of two pairs of sculptures of skeleton figures: weathered lindenwood figures from 17th-century Germany extend bony, beckoning hands, while macabre bronzes from Tibet portray a yogic brother and sister engrossed in a mad dance—as skin peels off like furled ribbons. Both sculptural pairs warn of the fleeting nature of life: in the Western tradition, as memento mori, and in the Tibetan Buddhist tradition, as an incentive to make diligent use of precious human rebirth.

“We have found one common denominator in the works of art we have gathered for Remember That You Will Die: whether from Europe or Tibet, all serve as reminders to the righteous that life is transient and volatile and that the believer must adhere to religious guidelines in order to safeguard a better hereafter,” says Martin Brauen, chief curator, Rubin Museum of Art. Dr. Brauen has organized the exhibition in collaboration with Karl Debreczeny, senior curator, Rubin Museum of Art, and Bonnie B. Lee, curatorial consultant.

Among the subjects found in the section of the presentation devoted to Western works are the danse macabre, or Dance of Death, and heaven, purgatory, and hell; among the Buddhist works, the landscape of the afterlife, whether it be paradise or hell, and brutal scenes of charnel grounds (considered ideal places to confront the fear of death through meditation).

"Remember That You Will Die" is to be shown concurrently at the Rubin Museum of Art with Bardo (February 12 through September 6, 2010), an exhibition, named for the intermediate state between death and enlightenment or rebirth in Tantric Buddhism, featuring works of art that have been used for centuries to prepare the initiate for death.

Exhibition Highlights
A number of the featured objects in "Remember That You Will Die" draw from popular folk traditions reflecting the societal preoccupation with death in Europe in the wake of The Black Death (14th century). Among these is The Dance of Death (1538), an engraving by Hans Holbein the Younger, depicting the danse macabre, an allegory for death not found in the Bible but acted out in plays and painted in church frescoes across the European continent to prompt Christian believers into piety as a way to guarantee salvation. Here, Holbein shows a peddler going along a country road with his wares as Death drags him in the opposite direction—to the underworld— while another Death figure in the shadows plays a long mandolin/violin-like bowed instrument, with his back turned to the peddler. Death, especially in the danse macabre form, often is seen to dance gaily and/or play musical instruments.

Two rosaries and two scrolls demonstrate the manner in which Christian and Buddhist works can take intriguingly similar forms. Two rosaries are featured in the exhibition, one a 16th-century German example of intricately carved ivory beads in the shape of human skulls, the other a 19th- century Tibetan beads of 100 skull-shaped beads more abstractly and coarsely carved from human bone.

Created for the wall of a chapel in the Marienkirche in Lubeck, Germany, the Lubeck Dance of Death scroll is an eight-foot long engraving showing Death as the universal social equalizer. The engraving starts on the left showing the greatest ecclesiastical power on Earth, the Pope, headed toward Death, and goes all the way down to the farmer and peasant, a young boy, young maiden, and infant. The brightly colored Charnel Grounds scroll from 19th-century Tibet unfolds more than seven feet, depicting eight cemeteries and the faithful who go there to meditate. Because dead bodies are left out, not buried, in charnel grounds, there could be no starker reminder of mortality than the corpses, ogres, hungry ghosts, and zombies depicted here.

A Buddhist initiation card, ritual bone apron, painted skull hand drum, and shinbone trumpet are among other objects on view from Tibet, to be seen nearby such European artifacts as a pocket watch in the form of a silver skull, a silver gilt pendant in the shape of a coffin, containing a skeleton with a frog sitting on its chest, and a doctor’s walking stick with a skull-shaped knob.

For more about this exhibition, visit the Rubin Museum webpage by clicking here. Click on images to see much larger, more detailed versions. And thanks so much, Pam, for letting me know about this show!

Images, Top to bottom:

1. Skull Pocket Watch, Europe; 1701-1900; Silver model of a human skull which opens up to show a pocket watch inside inscribed with skull and cross bone; Silver; Science Museum, London
2. Lord of the Charnel Grounds; Tibet; ca early 19th century; Bronze, American Museum of Natural History
3. Tsagli (Initiation Cards); Tibet; Date?; Pigments on paper, Rubin Museum of Art

"The Great Sarah Bernhardt Asleep in Her Coffin," Silver gelatin print, circa 1882

The Great Sarah Bernhardt Asleep in Her Coffin, Silver gelatin print, circa 1882

This iconoclastic Frenchwoman was arguably the most famous actress of the 19th century. She went on to become a film star in the early 20th century. In the 1880s, Bernhardt (1844-1923) made her own funeral arrangements. She picked out her own coffin because she was going to “sleep” in it forever. She had it delivered to her home and regularly slept in it. In her 1907 autobiography she wrote, “My bedroom was very tiny. The big bamboo bed took up all the room. In front of the window was my coffin, where I frequently installed myself to learn my lines.”

Bernhardt has this photograph taken in the classic postmortem style of the early 1880s. Though she was 78 years old when she died, this photograph depicts her in a death pose while she was still young and beautiful. Thus, this ersatz postmortem photo is the image many associate with her death.

From Sleeping Beauty II - Grief, Bereavement and the Family in Memorial Photography by Stanley B. Burns, M.D.

Quote and image via Liquid Night Tumbr found via Wisdom and Life Tumblr (my apologies for the earlier mis-credit). You can find out more about the excellent book from which it was drawn--Sleeping Beauty II - Grief, Bereavement and the Family in Memorial Photography by Stanley B. Burns, M.D.--by clicking here.

"Lenin's Embalmers," Ensemble Studio Theater, New York

"To keep the dream of the revolution alive, forever, we must keep Lenin alive, forever..."

Earlier this week, I had the good fortune to see the truly wonderful play "Lenin's Embalmers,"now showing at the Ensemble Studio Theater. This snappy, inventive, engrossing (sic) and splendidly acted play details the unlikely-yet-true story of the embalming-for-eternity of Vladamir Lenin's body in 1924 by two hapless Jewish scientists. At the time, this feat was considered something of a modern miracle; the resulting artifact, controversially (see below...), can still be visited--86 years later!--in Lenin's Mausoleum in Moscow's Red Square.

The play--narrated by the rueful and absurdist-joke-cracking ghost of Lenin (played by the uncannily Lenin-esque Peter Maloney, whose sad eyes haunt and blame)--is much more than the sum of its parts, and transforms the small, modest theater almost magically into a captivating, enthralling, and atmospheric drama. The dialogue is snappy, witty, and pitch-perfect; the themes--of science religion and magic, the Russian penchant for black humor in the face of unbearable circumstances, the madness of life under tyranny, and the very human drives of the people who make science and history--add depth and interest to the already incredibly compelling facts of the story.

Lenin's Embalming is playing at the Ensemble Studio Theater through March 28th. If you can make it before the run ends, I simply cannot recommend it more highly. Subtle, inventive, informative, splendidly acted... a play that really lingers with you, and a joy to watch. This play is also, notably, part of the Ensemble Studio Theatre/Alfred P. Sloan Foundation Science & Technology Project, "designed to stimulate artists to create credible and compelling new theatrical works exploring the worlds of science and technology, and to challenge existing stereotypes of scientists and engineers in popular culture." For more on this noble project, click here.

And, on a topical note: as if to prove the relevance of this seemingly arcane topic, just today, the Telegraph ran a story about a man arrested for attempting violence on Lenin's embalmed corpse, who, as the Telegraph describes, claimed "he wanted to let loose a volley of bullets at Lenin's carefully embalmed corpse, one of the Russian capital's most popular and ghoulish tourist attractions!" So, as you can see, the potent symbol of the incorruptible body of Communism continues to resonate and create controversy.

To find out more about the play, visit the theater website by clicking here. You can read a fascinating New York Times review, which parses much of the play's historical content and background, by clicking here. To find out about the book Lenin's Embalmers, which inspired (and provided the name for) the play, click here. You can read the alluded to Telegraph article about the man who tried to destroy the embalmed corpse of Lenin by clicking here. Although Lenin's embalmed body is still on display, it receives regular upkeep; click here to see an online photo show of Lenin's body getting its regular touch-up.

Full disclosure: I received tickets to see this show from the theater, who thought I might like to review it. I did not expect to love it as much as I did, and the free tickets had nothing to do for my ardor! Thanks, Ensemble Studio Theater, for such an excellent night of theater.

The Future of The Science Museum Debated by the New York TImes

Thanks so much, Matt, for sending me this really timely and thought-provoking article about the future of science museums--and a discussion of their fascinating past, as seen above--in today's New York Times. Much to mull over here, and it covers a lot of things that I have been thinking about of late. Following is an excerpt:

A science museum is a kind of experiment. It demands the most elaborate equipment: Imax theaters, NASA space vehicles, collections of living creatures, digital planetarium projectors, fossilized bones. Into this mix are thrust tens of thousands of living human beings: children on holiday, weary or eager parents, devoted teachers, passionate aficionados and casual passers-by. And the experimenters watch, test, change, hoping. ...

Hoping for what? What are the goals of these experiments, and when do they succeed? Whenever I’m near one of these museological laboratories, I eagerly submit to their probes, trying to find out. The results can be discouraging since some experiments seem so purposeless; their only goal might be to see if subjects can be persuaded to return for future amusement..... The experimentation may be a sign of the science museum’s struggle to define itself.

A century ago, such a notion would have been ridiculous. Museums were simply collections of objects. And science museums were collections of objects related to scientific inquiry and natural exploration. Their collections grew out of the “wonder cabinets” of gentlemen explorers, conglomerations of the marvelous.

Museums ordered their objects to reflect a larger natural order. In 1853, when a new natural history museum at Oxford University was being proposed, one advocate suggested that each specimen should have “precisely the same relative place that it did in God’s own Museum, the Physical Universe in which it lived and moved and had its being.” The science museum was meant to impress the visitor with the intricate order of the universe, the abilities of science to discern that order, and the powers of a culture able to present it all in so imposing a secular temple.

Not all of this was disinterested. Natural history museums typically treated non-Western cultures as if they were subsidiary branches in an evolutionary narrative; deemed closer to nature, these cultures were treated as part of natural history rather than as part of history. Self-aggrandizing posing was generally mixed in with the museum project.

But you can still feel its energy. Go to any science museum with an extensive collection and walk among its oldest display cases. The London Science Museum, for example, which had its origins in the Crystal Palace of the Great Exposition of 1851, has collections that still invoke the churning energies of the Industrial Revolution and its transformations.

One of the most astonishing collections I have seen is the Wellcome Collection, also in London. It includes moccasins owned by Florence Nightingale, Napoleon’s toothbrush, amputation saws, an array of prosthetic limbs, a Portuguese executioner’s mask, Etruscan votive offerings and obstetrical forceps. Henry Wellcome, who had made his fortune with the invention of the medicinal pill, owned over a million objects by the mid-1930s and imagined them fitting into a great “Museum of Man” that would encyclopedically trace humanity’s concerns with the body. After his death, the collection was partly dispersed, but even what is left is as exhilarating as it is bewildering. You look at such collections and sense an enormous exploratory enterprise. You end up with an enlarged understanding of the world’s variety and an equally enlarged sense of the human capacity to make sense of it.

But that ambition is gone and so is the trust in ourselves. This may be the crux of the uncertainty in contemporary science museums. Where does the museum place us, its human creators? ...

You can read the full article--which I really recommend!--by clicking here. I love that the reviewer was as happily intrigued by the Wellcome Collection as I; more on that wonderful institution (perhaps my favorite medical museum--if you can call it that--in the world!) here, here, here, here and here. Click on image to see much larger version.

Image: "Scarabattolo" (1675) by Domenico Remps (c. 1621-1699). Found at About.com.

Happy Saint Patrick's Day!

Image: Frontispiece: Images of Saint Columba, Saint Patrick, and Saint Brigida, Taken from the Spicilegium Sanctorum, and engraved at Paris, A.D. 1629, by Messingham. From The Most Ancient Lives of Saint Patrick, by Various Edited by James O'Leary, 1880, as found on Project Gutenberg; more here.

Reminder: Call for Papers, Congress of the European Association of Museums of the History of Medical Sciences, Copenhagen, September 16-19

This year's Congress of the European Association of Museums of the History of Medical Sciences will take place from September 16th-19th at the Medical Museion at the University of Copenhagen. As I said in an earlier post on this topic, "if the Museion's awesome blog Biomedicine on Display is any indication, this conference--which aims to investigate ways in which museums can respond to the challenge raised by the "molecularisation, miniaturisation...digitalisation and intangibilisation" of new medicine--will be thought-provoking, innovative, and revelatory."

I just received a reminder from Thomas Soderqvist, the conference organizer, for paper submissions. The deadline is March 29th. For more, see Thomas' email below:

Just to remind you about the forthcoming meeting in Copenhagen in September about the challenge to museums posed by contemporary developments in biomedical science and medical technology.

How do museums today handle the material and visual heritage of contemporary medical and health science and technology? How do curators wield the increasing amount and kinds of more or less intangible and invisible scientific, medical and digital objects? Which intellectual, conceptual, and practical questions does this challenge give rise to?

We're aiming for two intensive days with visually enhanced presentations, good discussions and excellent food in beautiful surroundings.

Read the full call here:
http://tinyurl.com/ylx5atx or here:
http://www.corporeality.net/museion/2009/12/09/contemporary-medical-science-and-technology-as-a-challenge-for-museums-copenhagen-16-19-september-2010

Further information here: http://www.mm.ku.dk/sker/eamhms.aspx

Send proposals for presentations, panels etc. to ths@sund.ku.dk, not later than Monday 29 March.

Program committee:
Ken Arnold, Wellcome Collection, London
Robert Bud, Science Museum, London
Judy Chelnick, National Museum of American History, Washington, D.C.
Mieneke te Hennepe, Boerhaave Museum, Leiden
Thomas Soderqvist, Medical Museion, University of Copenhagen (chair).

If you would like further information or have any questions, please contact Thomas Soderqvist at ths@sund.ku.dk. You can visit the Medical Museion website by clicking here, and its immensely readable blog "Biomedicine on Display" by clicking here. Visit the EAMHMS website by clicking here. Information about the last awesome EAMHMS conference can be found by clicking here.

Image: David Gregory & Debbie Marshall, Wellcome Images; SEM of blood corpuscles in clot. Scanning electron micrograph of red blood corpuscles and a single white blood cell entangled in the fibrin mesh of a clot, computer-coloured red/yellow/white; Scanning electron micrograph 2003; Collection: Wellcome Images

"The True and Horrid Story of Burke and Hare," Illustrated Lecture by Lisa Rosner, Observatory, Thursday March 18th

This Thursday we have a really exciting lecture at Observatory: Professor and scholar Lisa Rosner will be on hand to tell us the "true and spectacular history" of Williams Burke and Hare, perpetrators, in the name of medicine, of "the most atrocious murder spree of the century, outflanking even Jack the Ripper's," as detailed in her book The Anatomy Murders.

As she explains in an interview on the Dead Guys in Suits blog:

Between November 1827 and November 1828, in Edinburgh, Scotland, William Burke and William Hare killed 16 people – 3 men, 12 women, and 1 child – in order to sell their cadavers to an anatomy lecturer, Dr. Robert Knox. These were the first serial killings to gain media attention, 60 years before Jack the Ripper. The link between murder-for-profit and medical progress has fascinated people ever since. Robert Louis Stevenson wrote a short story based on it, called The Body Snatcher, which was turned into a terrific horror flick in 1945, starring Boris Karloff and Bela Lugosi..

Hear the entire story, get a tutorial on the eponymous practice of "burking," and purchase signed copies of her book the day after tomorrow at Observatory! Full details follow; very much hope to see you there!

The True and Horrid Story of Burke and Hare
An illustrated lecture and book signing by Lisa Rosner,
Professor of History at Richard Stockton College of New Jersey.
Date: Thursday, March 18th
Time: 8:00 PM
Admission: $5

Up the close and down the stair,
But and Ben with Burke and Hare.
Burke's the butcher, Hare's the thief,
Knox the man who buys the beef.
—anonymous street song

On March 18, 2010, Lisa Rosner will be discussing the myths and realities of the Burke and Hare case, resurrected in her recent book The Anatomy Murders: Being the True and Spectacular History of Edinburgh's Notorious Burke and Hare and of the Man of Science Who Abetted Them in the Commission of Their Most Heinous Crimes.

On Halloween night 1828, in the West Port district, a woman sometimes known as Madgy Docherty was last seen in the company of William Burke and William Hare. Days later, police discovered her remains in the surgery of the prominent anatomist Dr. Robert Knox. Docherty was the final victim of the most atrocious murder spree of the century, outflanking even Jack the Ripper's. Together with their accomplices, Burke and Hare were accused of killing sixteen people over the course of twelve months in order to sell their corpses as "subjects" for dissection. The ensuing criminal investigation raised troubling questions about the common practices by which medical men obtained cadavers, the lives of the poor in Edinburgh's back alleys, and the ability of the police to protect the public from cold-blooded murder.

Lisa Rosner is Professor of History at Richard Stockton College of New Jersey. She received her AB from Princeton University and her PhD from Johns Hopkins University. She has been awarded fellowships from the American Philosophical Society, the National Endowment of the Humanities, the Chemical Heritage Foundation, and the New Jersey Historical Commission. The Anatomy Murders is the third book in her historical trilogy on Edinburgh medicine. "The Worlds of Burke and Hare," the companion website to The Anatomy Murders, is available at Burke and Hare. You can find out more about her book by clicking here. You can find out more about her work by clicking here.

You can get directions to Observatory--which is next door to the Morbid Anatomy Library--by clicking here. You can find out more about Observatory here, join our mailing list by clicking here, and join us on Facebook by clicking here. You can read Lisa Rosner's entire interview on the Dead Guys in Suits blog by clicking here. To find out more about her book The Anatomy Murders, click here.

Image used by permission of the Library of the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh.

Morgue Slabs, East End of London, Free to a Good Home

This just in from Morbid Anatomy reader Eoin:

I work at an artists studio and we are currently having a clear out. We have four old morgue slabs and their bases that we are trying to dispose of. They are free to a good home but the new owner must take them all and arrange their own pick-up and delivery, they weigh well over a ton! Each slab is a four person lift. They are currently in the East End of London. I hope that we can find a new home as soon as possible (within a week to ten days) or we will have to unfortunately dump them.

Interested parties can email Eoin at studio@makesomespace.co.uk.

Tonight at Observatory: “Imaging the Diorama” An Illustrated Lecture with Diane Fox

Tonight at Observatory! Very much hope to see you there!

“Imaging the Diorama:” An Illustrated Lecture with Diane Fox
Presented by Morbid Anatomy
Date: Thursday, March 11
Time: 8:00 PM
Admission: $5.00

In 1889 Carl Akeley, working for the Milwaukee Public Museum, created the first total habitat diorama by arranging stuffed muskrats into a facsimile of their natural environment. While the originators of the diorama strove to heighten its sense of reality, many contemporary artists have used the medium’s format to comment on its artificiality or hyper reality.

This lecture will examine the work of several photographers who use the form of the natural history museum diorama to comment on the connection (or lack of connection) between the human and natural world.

Diane Fox is a Lecturer in the College of Architecture and Design at the University of Tennessee in Knoxville where she teaches graphic design and photography. Fox received her MFA from The University of Tennessee and her BFA from Middle Tennessee State University. Her current body of photographic work, "UnNatural History," is composed of images shot in various natural history museums in the US and Europe. Her solo exhibits have been exhibited in the Erie Art Museum, Erie, PA; Tower Fine Arts Gallery, SUNY Brockport, Brockport, NY; Gallery Stokes in Atlanta, GA; Santa Reparata Gallery, Florence Italy; Apex Gallery, South Dakota School of Mines and Technology, Rapid City, SD; Sarratt Gallery, Vanderbilt University Nashville, TN; and Dom Muz Gallery, Torun, Poland among others. You can see some of her work at dianefoxphotography.com.

You can get directions by clicking here. You can find out more about Observatory here, join our mailing list by clicking here, and join us on Facebook by clicking here.

Image: "Tiger and Crows, Natural History Museum, London, England.” Diane Fox

The Annual Mütter Museum Ball, Friday March 12, 2010, Tomorrow Night!

If you're free and in the Philadelphia area tomorrow night, why not spend the evening at the 2010 Annual Mütter Museum Ball? A staff member of the Mütter has assured me that the event will "very 'Mutterian'-- all Victorian and 19th-century inspired." All that, plus absinthe sponsorship and the encouragement of "festive, 19th-century inspired garb" for participants!" I so wish I could go! Full details follow:

VIP includes open bar, special hors d'oeuvres and access to the
VIP Vieux Carré Absinthe Lounge
Doors open at 7:30PM
$100

General includes beer & wine bar and hors d'oeuvres
Doors open at 8:30PM
$50

Featuring Philly's hottest DJ, Maria V!
Festive, 19th-century inspired garb encouraged!

Co-Sponsored by Vieux Carre Absinthe, Pennsylvania Hospital, Cephalon, American Exhibitions, Bones Clones, Inc. and GIANTmicrobes

Click here to find out more and purchase tickets. Click on invite to view larger more detailed version.

"Cartoon Grotesques Let us Face the Real Horrors," Times Online

Ostensibly a review of two current exhibitions in Britain--one a celebration of P.T. Barnum on his 200th birthday, the other an collection of work by Ronald Searle--the article "Cartoon Grotesques Let us Face the Real Horrors" on yesterday's Times Online also provides a nice discussion of the insuppressible human interest in grotesquery, curiosities, and the monstrous.

From the article:

We think we live in an age of individualism and “diversity”, but if you look around at advertising, entertainment and much of public life a strait-jacket of approved normalities closes around you. It is partly visual: for both sexes there is an approved shape and style: slim, toned, smart-casual, shiny hair, good teeth, minimal wrinkles. In outlook, too, there is an approved norm: middling-liberal, metrosexual, environmentally aware, vaguely concerned about “issues” but carrying religious or political opinions with studied lightness and a self-deprecating Blairy grin...

Yet we secretly crave grotesques, extremes, impossibilities. We know that there are wild dreamers, crazy prophets, monstrous oddities and inconvenient passions far beyond our tidy sexuality. We yearn for weirdness that explodes the mould and doesn’t care. Deep down, we know that if we don’t confront it the strangeness will haunt our dreams or jump us down a dark alley.

So we go looking for it. Some find it in art, from Hieronymus Bosch to Salvador Dalí, some seek horror films, some the most twisted pornography or sadism. Millions eat popcorn while watching Orc armies, the Smurfy fantasy of Avatar or the bizarrerie of Tim Burton’s Alice. Many, guiltily, find it in news reports of real suffering and mutilation, or in voyeuristic TV programmes about illness or obesity. But real or invented, we have to confront abnormality lest it take us by surprise...

You can read the whole article by clicking here. For more on the Barnum exhibition (entitled "Humbug!"), click here; click here for more on the Searle exhibit. Thanks, Mike, for sending this my way.

Image: "Barnum's New American Museum, circa 1866" From About.com.

"Joanna Ebenstein's Morbid Obsession," Article, Canadian Medical Association Journal, March 2010

David McDonald of the Canadian Medical Association Journal just published an article based on a long chat we had about the seductive nature of medical collections, my photo project Anatomical Theatre (from which the above is drawn), the perilous nature of medical collections, and the larger Greater Morbid Anatomy endeavor. You can read the resulting insightful and incisive article--which will also run in the next issue of Canadian Medical Association Journal under the title "Joanna Ebenstein's Morbid Obsession"--in its entirety by clicking here.

Image: From the Anatomical Theatre exhibition "Anatomical Venuses" Life-sized Wax models with human hair in rosewood and Venetian glass cases; Workshop of Clemente Susini of Florence, 1781-1786. The Josephinum : Vienna, Austria. See full collection of images and text here.

"An Iconography of Contagion," Web Exhibition, National Library of Medicine

About a hundred years ago, public health took a visual turn. In an era of devastating epidemic and endemic infectious disease, health professionals began to organize coordinated campaigns that sought to mobilize public action through eye-catching wall posters, illustrated pamphlets, motion pictures, and glass slide projections...

Check out the National Library of Medicine's wonderful new web exhibition "An Iconography of Contagion"--which explores the relationship between posters and public health, and from which all of the above text and images were drawn--by clicking here. Curated by Friend-of-Morbid-Anatomy Michael Sappol, this is a characteristically smart, thoughtful, and visually rich exhibition.

You can see the entire exhibition, and read the full text and full image captions, by clicking here. You can see many more wonderful images in the gallery section by clicking here. Click on images above to see much larger, richer versions.

Image Credits:

1. She may be…a bag of TROUBLE. Syphilis – Gonorrhea., U.S. Public Health Service, United States, 1940s. Photomechanical print: color; 41 x 51 cm. Artist: “Christian.”
2. Ali si zdrav? (Are you healthy?), Golnik, Slovenia, Yugoslavia, 1950s. Photomechanical print: color; 42 x 60 cm.
3. Tuberkulose undersøgelse – en borgerpligt (Tuberculosis examination – a citizen’s duty.), Copenhagen, Denmark, 1947. Color lithograph; 62 x 85 cm. Designer/artist: : Henry Thelander (fl. 1902-1986). Lithographers: Andreasen & Lachmann.
4. Tuberculosis bacilli. Chinese Anti-Tuberculosis Association, Shanghai, 1953.
5. La course a la mort. (The race with death.) Ligue Nationale Française contre le Peril Vénérién, France, ca. 1926. Color lithograph; reproduction of a pastel drawing; 69 x 88 cm. Artist: Charles Emmanuel Jodelet (1883-1969).

Morbid Anatomy Presents at Observatory: 3 March Events

We at Morbid Anatomy are pleased to present three great upcoming lectures at Observatory this month--one to take place tonight! One more event--a panel discussion on Modern Ruins and the Post-Industrial Sublime, to take place on March 25th--will be announced very soon. Hope to see you at one or all of these great presentations!

"Death Becomes Them" Unearthing the Suicides of the Brilliant, the Famous, and the Notorious; a reading and lecture
Tonight! Thursday, March 4
Time: 8:00
Admission: $5.00

In Death Become Them, Unearthing the Suicides of the Brilliant, the Famous, and the Notorious, journalist/author Alix Strauss will discuss in an illustrated lecture based on her research for her book "Death Becomes Them," the phenomenon and history of suicide and the seductive appeal of celebrity suicide in Western culture. Over the course of her lecture, she will present fascinating details leading up to the last days of icons of celebrity suicide such as Virginia Woolf, Sigmund Freud, Spalding Gray, Kurt Cobain, Diane Arbus, and Vincent van Gogh. After reading from selected passages, she will discuss the methodology, pathology, and psychology of these luminaries, with an eye towards understanding why such brilliant people all chose this particular end. She will also touch on society's needs to “mass mourn,” the cultural phenomenon of funerals, and the role that mental illness and addiction play in suicide.

Along with the reading and lecture, Alix will also do a quiz, complete with prizes. Specially packaged copies of "Death Become Them," which come with a Quija Board Key chain or a Happy Childhood Memories Spay, will be available for purchasing and signing. Those who buy copies will also get a special gift -- a small bottle of Funeral Home perfume, a coffin filled with skeleton mints or a waterproof mascara.

Alix Strauss is author of Death Become Them: Unearthing the Suicides of the Brilliant, the Famous, and the Notorious. She also a media savvy social satirist, and featured lifestyle and trend writer. She is the author of the award winning short story collection, The Joy of Funerals (St. Martin's Press), and the forthcoming novel, Based Upon Availability, June of 2010 (Harper Collins). You can find out more about her book by clicking here. You can find out more at alixstrauss.com.

“Imaging the Diorama:” An Illustrated Lecture with Diane Fox
Date: Thursday, March 11
Time: 8:00 PM
Admission: $5.00

In 1889 Carl Akeley, working for the Milwaukee Public Museum, created the first total habitat diorama by arranging stuffed muskrats into a facsimile of their natural environment. While the originators of the diorama strove to heighten its sense of reality, many contemporary artists have used the medium’s format to comment on its artificiality or hyper reality.

This lecture will examine the work of several photographers who use the form of the natural history museum diorama to comment on the connection (or lack of connection) between the human and natural world.

Diane Fox is a Lecturer in the College of Architecture and Design at the University of Tennessee in Knoxville where she teaches graphic design and photography. Fox received her MFA from The University of Tennessee and her BFA from Middle Tennessee State University. Her current body of photographic work, "UnNatural History," is composed of images shot in various natural history museums in the US and Europe. Her solo exhibits have been exhibited in the Erie Art Museum, Erie, PA; Tower Fine Arts Gallery, SUNY Brockport, Brockport, NY; Gallery Stokes in Atlanta, GA; Santa Reparata Gallery, Florence Italy; Apex Gallery, South Dakota School of Mines and Technology, Rapid City, SD; Sarratt Gallery, Vanderbilt University Nashville, TN; and Dom Muz Gallery, Torun, Poland among others. You can see some of her work at dianefoxphotography.com.

The True and Horrid Story of Burke and Hare
An illustrated lecture and book signing by Lisa Rosner,
Professor of History at Richard Stockton College of New Jersey.
Date: Thursday, March 18th
Time: 8:00 PM
Admission: $5

Up the close and down the stair,
But and Ben with Burke and Hare.
Burke's the butcher, Hare's the thief,
Knox the man who buys the beef.
—anonymous street song

On March 18, 2010, Lisa Rosner will be discussing the myths and realities of the Burke and Hare case, resurrected in her recent book The Anatomy Murders: Being the True and Spectacular History of Edinburgh's Notorious Burke and Hare and of the Man of Science Who Abetted Them in the Commission of Their Most Heinous Crimes.

On Halloween night 1828, in the West Port district, a woman sometimes known as Madgy Docherty was last seen in the company of William Burke and William Hare. Days later, police discovered her remains in the surgery of the prominent anatomist Dr. Robert Knox. Docherty was the final victim of the most atrocious murder spree of the century, outflanking even Jack the Ripper's. Together with their accomplices, Burke and Hare were accused of killing sixteen people over the course of twelve months in order to sell their corpses as "subjects" for dissection. The ensuing criminal investigation raised troubling questions about the common practices by which medical men obtained cadavers, the lives of the poor in Edinburgh's back alleys, and the ability of the police to protect the public from cold-blooded murder.

Lisa Rosner is Professor of History at Richard Stockton College of New Jersey. She received her AB from Princeton University and her PhD from Johns Hopkins University. She has been awarded fellowships from the American Philosophical Society, the National Endowment of the Humanities, the Chemical Heritage Foundation, and the New Jersey Historical Commission. The Anatomy Murders is the third book in her historical trilogy on Edinburgh medicine. "The Worlds of Burke and Hare," the companion website to The Anatomy Murders, is available at Burke and Hare. You can find out more about her book by clicking here. You can find out more about her work by clicking here.

You can get directions to Observatory by clicking here. You can find out more about Observatory here, join our mailing list by clicking here, and join us on Facebook by clicking here.

Image: "Tiger and Crows, Natural History Museum, London, England.” Diane Fox

"Kinetica: An Exhibition of Automata, Kinetica, Mechanica, Robotics, and New Media," Call for Works

This looks like it could be a really great show. Please help spread the word to any interested artsy/engineering/builder types! Call for works follows:

* EXHIBITION ANNOUNCEMENT & CALL TO ARTISTS *

Please note: This is not a typical art show. Not all participants are artists. Inventors, mechanics, and people who ordinarily have nothing to do with the art world are involved in this exhibition. That said, I encourage artists to make use of their whimsy. This show is about wonder, as well as craft, science, mathematics, and experimentation.

"Kinetica" is an exhibition of kinetic, automatic, mechanic, robotic, &etc. sculpture.

It will be held at the Candle Factory in New Orleans. The two main events are the opening on Saturday, April 24, and the closing on Saturday, May 8. The events are scheduled to begin at 6pm.

Proposals-only deadline: March 20th. Send idea, space required, special requirements, etc. to Myrtle von Damitz lll at myrtlered@gmail.com

I will consider late proposals but must begin to map out the installation as early as possible.

INSTALLATION will begin on Saturday, April 17. Artists are responsible for installation. Work that has to be shipped must include detailed installation instructions, and arrive by April 17.

Also important: whether your piece can only be run by you, its creator, or whether I or anyone else running the exhibition can turn it on when needed.

Participants are responsible for display arrangements, ie: tables, pedestals, etc.

The Candle Factory is a warehouse situated on the west side of the Industrial Canal, and is a known events destination & a good crowd is expected. There is a great electrical set-up and room both inside and outside for a wide variety of work. The owner, Charles Handler, lives inside the warehouse and security is good. However, please take note that this IS a warehouse space and not a pristine gallery.

The show will not run on regular gallery hours, but will be on in full force for both opening and closing events, leaving room for multiple event-specific possibilities. I would like very much to find anyone or any group working on Rube Goldberg Machines!

I'm working towards arranging school field trips to view the work and for the artists to speak to the kids about their ideas and how they work. If you are part of the show, I'd like to know if I can schedule you to be present on any of these days (TBA!).

I will be able to work out showings by appointment, as well, for however many pieces can be operable during the run of the show.

Questions: myrtlered@gmail.com or 504 908 4741

Image: Vaucanson's mechanical duck. More on that wonderful 18th Century creation, which "could flap its wings, eat, and digest grain," here.

Proteus Gowanus, Morbid Anatomy Library, And Observatory in the New Yorker

Big congratulations to all of our compatriots in the larger Proteus Gowanus complex--Proteus Gowanus, Reanimation Library, Fixer's Collective, Morbid Anatomy Library and Observatory--for the wonderful shout-out (see above) in this week's New Yorker! And special thanks to Sasha Chavchavadze and Tammy Pittman, whose vision brought it all into being, and to Patricia Marx, for being interested in our peculiar and fascinating warren of idiosyncratic spaces.

The above in an excerpt from Patricia Marx's "On and Off the Avenue" in the March 8th issue of the New Yorker; click here to find out more.

Visit the Morbid Anatomy Library on Rocketboom Television

Ella Morton of Rocketboom: Daily Internet Culture has just produced a short but thoughtful video piece about the Morbid Anatomy Library, the collections therein, and our shared fascination with art and mortality. You can watch it above, or by clicking here.

For those of you unfamiliar with the library, the Morbid Anatomy Library is a research library and private collection open to the interested public. It makes available a collection of books, photographs, ephemera, and artifacts relating to medical museums, anatomical art, collectors and collecting, cabinets of curiosity, the history of medicine, death and mortality, memorial practice, art and natural history, arcane media, and other topics explored on this blog.

The library is part of the Proteus Gowanus Gallery Interdisciplinary Gallery and Reading Room, and is located in the Brooklyn, New York; directions can be found here. To make an appointment to visit the library in person, email morbidanatomy@gmail.com. More about the library here, here and here. You can find out more about the piece and Rocketboom by clicking here.