Amazing Auction Alert: "Out of the Ordinary" Auction, September 5th, Christie's Auction House, South Kensington, London

All of these exquisitely idiosyncratic objects--and many, many more!--will be included in the upcoming "Out of the Ordinary" auction at Christie's South Kensington, London on September 5th.

You can find out more--and see the complete listings!--by clicking here. Thanksso much  to Carol Holzner and Pam Grossman for bringing this amazing sale--which I will do my best to attend!--to my attention.

 

Lots, top to bottom:

1. Lot 16: A RARE NORTH ITALIAN TAXIDERMY OSTRICH , BY JOSEPH VULPINUS, DATED 1785; £8,000 - £12,000($12,264 - $18,396)
2. Lot 13:  A WAXWORK ANATOMICAL MALE TORSO; EARLY 20TH CENTURY; £800 - £1,200($1,226 - $1,840)
3. Lot 12: A TAXIDERMY PEACOCK PAVO CRISTATUS; 20TH CENTURY; £1,000 - £1,500($1,533 - $2,300)
4. Lot 4: A PAIR OF GERMAN SCAGLIOLA DIDACTIC PANELS ; MID-19TH CENTURY, BY FRANZ JOSEF STEGER & CARL ERNST BOCK; £8,000 - £12,000($12,264 - $18,396)
5. Lot 3: THREE PAINT AND INK HEIGHTENED PHOTOGRAPHS; THE PHOTOGRAPHS LATE 19TH EARLY 20TH CENTURY, LATER RE-INTERPRETED BY MARCOS RAYA, 2013; £3,000 - £4,000($4,599 - $6,132)
6. Lot 11: A GROUP OF THREE PAINTED CANVAS MASONIC PANELS; EARLY 20TH CENTURY; £1,000 - £1,500($1,533 - $2,300)
7. Lot 6: A GROUP OF ELEVEN VICTORIAN HAIR-WORK MOURNING ART PICTURES; LATE 19TH EARLY 20TH CENTURY; £1,000 - £1,500($1,533 - $2,300)

Museum of Hunting and Fishing (Deutsches Jagd und Fischereimuseum), Munich, Germany; Guest Post by Eric Huang

One of my favorite people in all the world--the delightful and intrepid Eric Huang (aka dinoboy)--took a trip to the Munich Museum of Hunting and Fishing (Deutsches Jagd und Fischereimuseum) a few weeks ago. His findings were so interesting that I asked him to write a guest post for the readers of Morbid Anatomy:

Munich's Museum of Hunting and Fishing (Deutsches Jagd und Fischereimuseum) houses hunting artefacts. There are vintage knives, drinking horns, paintings, and taxidermy galore. Cool stuff, sure, but at first glance the museum is profoundly ... meh. Other museums tackle the topic in more extensive, confronting, beautiful ways. That said, Deutsches Jagd und Fischereimuseum is worth a visit for two reasons.

The museum is on consecrated ground (top 2 images), namely a 13th century church in disrepair called Augustinerkirche. Taxidermy mounts replace stations of the cross, an Irish Elk skeleton stands in place of a crucifix in the nave, and a collection of the Snow Queen's finest hunting sleds forms the the altar.

Even better than the location is something that makes the Munich museum truly unique: wolpertingers (images 5-7). The size of a rabbit, often winged, antlered, sometimes fanged and reptilian, always dangerous: wolpertingers are rabbit-like animals from Bavarian folklore. Jackalopes are arguably North American wolpertines, though much less terrible than the Bavarian varieties.

The first wolpertinger encounter is in a diorama nestled between the native bird and mammals sections of the museums. Later on, wolpertines get their own room - oddly adjacent to a depiction of prehistoric humans. The exhibition also includes prints  illustrating the anatomy and dissection of a wolpertine. This bottom photo shows two animals in the act of creating a wolpertinger!

There was also a temporary exhibit of human hunting archetypes. The focus was on Vikings, culminating in an entire wall about Thor with Marvel comics and movie posters from the latest film. Asterix also makes an appearance. It reminded me of a school fair.

To find out more about the Munich's Museum of Hunting and Fishing (Deutsches Jagd und Fischereimuseum), click here. To find out more about the delightful Eric Huang, click here.

From 18th Century Private Natural History Cabinet to Early Museum: The Spallanzani Museum, Reggio Emilia, Italy; Guest Post by Alessandro Molinengo, Nautilus Shop, Modena

 

Friend Alessandro Molinengo, co-proprietor of the Modena's amazing Nautilus Antiques, brought Evan Michelson and I one rainy night to visit to Spallanzani Museum in Reggio Emilia, Italy. The origins of this museum stem from a "small collection of natural products" opened by priest, biologist and physiologist Lazzaro Spallanzani in his home in 1770; today, the collection--some still in their original cases!--is located in the Civic Museum of Reggio Emilia.

I asked Alessandro to write a guest post telling the readers of Morbid Anatomy more about this astounding collection, which had Evan and I literally gasping aloud as we turned each corner; All images are my own; you can see many many more by clicking here or here:

Lazzaro Spallanzani (10 January 1729 – 12 February 1799) was an Italian Catholic priest, biologist and physiologist who made important contributions to the experimental study of bodily functions, animal reproduction, and essentially animal echolocation. His research of biogenesis paved the way for the investigations of Louis Pasteur. 

Since 1771 he had managed to create a Museum of Natural History in Pavia, which over the years acquired a great reputation, even internationally, and was even visited by the Emperor Joseph II of Austria. 

In 1785, while on a trip to Constantinople and the Balkans, he was accused by the custodian of the Museum of Pavia (instigated by some colleagues) of stealing artifacts from the museum: the story ended after one year with the demonstration of the complete innocence of Spallanzani and punishment of slanderers. 

His indefatigable exertions as a traveler, his skill and good fortune as a collector, his brilliance as a teacher and expositor, and his keenness as a conversationalist no doubt aided largely in accounting for Spallanzani's exceptional fame among his contemporaries; his letters account for his close relationships with many famed scholars and philosophers, like Buffon, Lavoisier, and Voltaire. 

His life was one of incessant eager questioning of nature on all sides, and his many and varied works all bear the stamp of a fresh and original genius, capable of stating and solving problems in all departments of science. 

He died from bladder cancer on 12 February 1799, in Pavia. After his death, his bladder was removed for study by his colleagues, after which it was placed on public display in a museum in Pavia, where it remains to this day. 

Since 1770, Lazzaro Spallanzani set up in the rooms of his home in Scandiano a "small collection of natural products,"which today is located in the Civic Museums of Reggio Emilia. 

It’s a rare and precious document in the history of collecting naturalistic ranked according to scientific knowledge at the end of the eighteenth century. It includes zoological, with particular reference to marine life, paleontological, mineralogical, lithological and botanical gardens, as well as decorative objects, such as pictures, tables and ornaments, testifying, in its diversity, the variety of interests of the scientist. The materials are the result of purchases, exchanges and collections made during the many trips Spallanzani during the summer months, to conduct scientific experiments, and to procure materials for the Museum of Natural History of the University of Pavia.

Purchased by the Municipality of Reggio Emilia in 1799, at the death of scientist, collection has been preserved in its original consistency, finding final location in the Palazzo of St. Francis from the 1830. The current layout of the exhibition is related to the reorganization of collections in 1883 by Alfredo Jona, displayed in several cabinets, some of which are original furnishings of the Spallanzani’s house, following the Linnaean system in use in the late eighteenth century.

You can find out more about the by the Spallanzani Museum of Reggio Emilia by clicking here. All images are my own (click on image to see larger versions); you can see many more by clicking here or here. You can find out more about the Nautilus Shop by clicking here, and can "like" the shop on Facebook by clicking here. The shop is open on Saturdays from 3 until 7 PM or by appointment, and is located at via Cesare Battisti 60 in Modena, Italy.

This Thursday Night at Observatory: "Natural Histories: Extraordinary Rare Book Selections from the American Museum of Natural History Library" with Tom Baione of AMNH

This Thursday, January 10, I am so very excited to be hosting my former colleague at the American Museum of Natural History--library director Tom Baione--at Observatory. He will be talking about--and showing scores of amazing illustrations from!--a variety of rarely seen illustrated books residing in the museum's research library special collections as explored in his new book Natural Histories: Extraordinary 
Rare Book Selections from the American Museum of Natural History Library
. We will also have twenty copies of this gorgeous book--which  features forty suitable-for-framing art prints of images from the book--available for sale and signing by Mr. Baione!

Full details follow. Hope very much to see you there!

Natural Histories: Extraordinary 
Rare Book Selections from the American Museum of Natural History Library: Illustrated lecture and Book Release Party with Tom Baione of New York’s American Museum of Natural History
Date: Thursday, January 10
Time: 8:00 PM
Admission: $5
Presented by Morbid Anatomy
*** Copies of the book will be available for sale and signing

Most people are well acquainted with the front-stage wonders of New York's American Museum of Natural History--the world class habitat group dioramas, the highly stylized hall of biodiversity, the epic dinosaur skeletons; what is less well known is the equally astounding back-stage collection, which includes an world-renowned collection of exquisite, rare, and beautifully illustrated books on the natural sciences held by museum's research library. The new book Natural Histories: Extraordinary 
Rare Book Selections from the American Museum of Natural History Library
, edited by AMNH's Tom Baione, brings these hidden works to the fore, showcasing forty extraordinary works created between the 16th and 20th centuries, covering all seven continents, and spanning such diverse scientific fields as anthropology, astronomy, earth science,
 paleontology, and zoology. The book also features essays about each work by Museum curators, scientists, and librarians, as well as forty extraordinary, suitable-for-framing art prints of images from the book.

In tonight's highly illustrated lecture, join American Museum of Natural History's Boeschenstein Director of
 Library Services and volume editor Tom Baione for a look inside the Natural Histories... and a virtual trip behind the scenes of the Library's Rare Book Room. Attendees will also have the opportunity to purchase--and have signed!--their own copy of this gorgeous new volume.

Tom Baione, a Brooklyn native, started working in the Museum's Library in 1995 
after attending Pratt Institute's School of Library and Information
 Science. After years in the Library's Special Collections and Reference 
Services units, Tom became the Library's Director in 2010. He is an active
 member of New York's Grolier Club and lives in midtown with his high
school sweetheart. The Museum was his favorite childhood destination and he still reports a thrill upon entering the museum each day.

More here.

It Came from the Stores, Exhibition, Grant Museum of Zoology, London, Through August 31, 2012

“A lovely skeleton, but sadly lacking a skull,” laments one of the tags afforded to the remains of a Capuchin monkey in this show of the unseen at the ever-exotic Grant Museum. “Rarely do ‘incomplete’ specimens make the grade for display.”

When I am in London, I will most certainly be checking out the wonderful sounding exhibition "It Came from the Stores," on view at the incomparable Grant Museum  until August 31st.

You can find out more here.

Image caption: An elephant shrew is among the specimens on show at the Grant Museum of Zoology

© UCL, Grant Museum of Zoology

Mermaid Polka, Sheet Music,1850

I love these delectable creatures of the nautical sublime, especially their seaweed bracelets and headdresses. As described on the Beauty, Virtue and Vice online exhibit of the American Antiquarian Society website (from which the images is also sourced):

Mermaid Polka. Lith. of Napoleon Sarony, 1850. [H. D. Hewitt]

In the nineteenth century, informal musical entertainments were a very common American pastime, and the piano was a common presence in American parlors. The piano’s rise in popularity coincided with advances in printing technology, and a booming sheet music industry was one result of these simultaneous developments.

American consumers purchased particular pieces of music for various reasons. Certainly, popular songs of the American musical stage became bestselling sheet music, but it is clear that sheet music publishers recognized that American consumers would buy even unfamiliar music if the cover art was appealing enough. Pictorial sheet music covers did double duty within the household: displayed above a keyboard even when a piano wasn’t in use, they functioned as decorative art.

Nineteenth-century pictorial sheet music covers capitalized on an endless array of already popular subjects, ideas, and themes in order to capture buyers’ attention. Over the course of the nineteenth century, sheet music images of beautiful women remained the most consistently popular type of illustration. In Mermaid Polka, these nude and loosely robed young women are graceful, demure, and carefree. They embody various ideas about women’s nature, with a titillating erotic accent. This lavish visual fantasy of beautiful young sea nymphs frolicking in the moonlight was meant to appeal to a wide variety of potential buyers. While women and men alike might have enjoyed this image for its pictorial beauty and expression of innocent romantic pleasure, men might also have associated it with antebellum dancing-girl performances (which were enjoyed by overwhelmingly male audiences) and European paintings like Botticelli’s celebrated fifteenth-century work, The Birth of Venus.

More here. Click on image to see much finer, larger version.

Activating Stilled Lives: The Aesthetics and Politics of Specimens on Display; International Conference at the Department of History of Art, UCL

This exciting conference--free and open to all!--just announced! Looks like a good one; so wish I could go!

Cultures of Preservation
Prepared specimens appear in many guises: as monstrous or typical organs preserved in formaldehyde and kept in glass jars not unlike pickled food, as stained and fixed tissue slices, or as skilfully arranged mounted animals. They may be found in cabinets of curiosities, in the laboratories of histologists, in anatomy theatres or in natural history collections, but nowadays equally in art galleries, the shop windows of fashionable boutiques, or horror films. This research network is concerned with such kinds of preserved natural objects, in particular with anatomical wet or dry preparations and taxidermy. It explorses the hybrid status of these objects between nature and representation, art and science and studies their fabrication, history and display.

The network is a collaboration between the UCL Department of History of Art, UCL collections, in particular the Grant Museum of Zoology, the Hunterian Museum, London and the Natural History Museum, London.

Activating Stilled Lives: The Aesthetics and Politics of Specimens on Display
International conference at the Department of History of Art, UCL
Thursday 17 May - Friday 18 May 2012

The past twenty years saw an explosion of exhibitions fathoming the relations between art and science as well as numerous refurbishments of natural history or former colonial museums. Many of these displays and gallery transformations mobilised specimens, be it taxidermied animals or preserved human body parts. Objects were put into new contexts opening up their meanings, others disappeared in storage or travelled back to the countries where they were once collected. The conference will address the challenges institutions face when dealing with formerly living entities and consider the aesthetics and politics of their display. The idea is to discuss the use of specimens in temporary exhibitions, museums or university collections and the role curators, art and artists have been playing in the transformation of these spaces. We also would like to consider how preserved specimens have changed through the altering contexts in which they have been displayed. One could name the initial transformation of organisms into objects, the more recent re-definition of pathological specimens as human remains, or the dramatic rearrangements that took place when natural history, anthropology or anatomy collections (many dating from the nineteenth century) were updated – coinciding with a shift in audiences, from specialists to a broader public. Often the historical displays were significantly altered, or even destroyed and replaced by „techy“ but at times also sentimentalised, „post-modern“ installations that still await a critical assessment.

Beyond that, the question of preservation shall be considered in a more expanded sense, as this subject area offers a unique opportunity to reflect more broadly on issues of conservation and their ethics and to raise a variety of questions such as: How and why do various cultures preserve elements of what is considered as nature? How does this relate to environmental notions of conservation and extinction? Should flawed specimens be disposed of? Can museums as a whole be considered cultural preserves? Should we preserve the preserves? And last but not least: Do we really need to embalm everything?

Confirmed speakers: Claude d'Anthenaise (Director, Musée de la chasse et de la nature, Paris), Steve Baker (Artist and Art Historian, Norfolk), Christine Borland (Artist, Glasgow), Mark Carnall (Curator, Grant Museum of Zoology, London), Nélia Dias (Anthropologist, Lisbon), Anke te Heesen (Museology / European Ethnology, Berlin), Petra Lange-Berndt (Art Historian, London), John MacKenzie (Professor Emeritus of Imperial History, Lancaster), Robert Marbury (Artist / Minnesota Association of Rogue Taxidermy, Baltimore), Angela Matyssek (Art Historian, Marburg / Maastricht), Lisa O'Sullivan (Curator, Science Museum/art-history/events/culture_of_preservation London), Hans-Jörg Rheinberger (Historian of Science, Berlin), Rose Marie San Juan (Art Historian, London), Johannes Vogel (Director, Museum für Naturkunde, Berlin)

Detailed programme: For further information please contact
Mechthild Fend m.fend(@)ucl.ac.uk or Petra Lange-Berndt p.lange-berndt(@)ucl.ac.uk

More information available here.

The Philadelphia Academy of Natural Sciences Celebrates its Illustrious and Incredible Collection and History in Two New Exhibitions and a Book!

In the 17th, 18th and early 19th centuries, when natural history was still called philosophy and most naturalists were amateurs, collectors would create what they called cabinets of curiosities — accumulations of animal, vegetable, mineral and anthropological specimens to amaze and amuse.

Often these collections grew large enough to occupy entire rooms, or even buildings. In some cases, they turned out to be precursors of modern museums.

In a way, that was the kind of project seven Philadelphia men embarked on in 1812, when they rented premises over a millinery shop, gathered a few preserved insects, some seashells and not much more, and created the Academy of Natural Sciences of Philadelphia...

--"Cupboards of Curiosities Spill Over," Cornelia Dean, The New York Times

The Philadelphia Academy of Natural Sciences has a lot going for it. It is the oldest natural science research institution and natural history museum in the New World, with a history stretching back to 1812. It boasts the Titian R. Peale Butterfly and Moth Collection, a lot of nearly 100 glass boxes containing said insects arranged in pleasingly geometric patterns by Titian Peale, son of painter and first American museologist Charles Willson Peale (see 4th image down). It boasts fossils collected by American president and Declaration of Independence author Thomas Jefferson. It also houses an incredibly vast and utterly astounding collection of natural history artifacts, books, taxidermy, skeletons, wet specimens and more. More's the pity, then, that you would never suspect the quality and breadth of this collection by its public face, which gives one the impression that The Academy is merely a bland, second-rate natural history museum aimed at easily distractable children.

I am very pleased to report, then, that the Philadelphia Academy of Natural Sciences has used the pretext of its 200th birthday to right this wrong, and make visible its illustrious history and mind-bogglingly gorgeous collection through 2 new exhibitions--both now on view--and a new nearly 500-page luxurious book. One exhibition--"The Academy at 200: The Nature of Discovery"--displays rarely viewed specimens and artifacts from the museum stores. "Everything Under the Sun," a second exhibition, features luminous photographs by the amazing Rosamond Purcell of a variety of the incredible artifacts and specimens hidden backstage. The associated book is entitled A Glorious Enterprise: The Academy of Natural Sciences of Philadelphia and the Making of American Science and features Rosamond Purcell's lavish color photographs.

Above is an excerpt from The New York Times' review of the book and exhibitions; you can read the entire piece and see the photographic sideshow (from which the above images are drawn) by clicking here and here, respectively. You can find out more about the book “A Glorious Enterprise"--and purchase a copy of your very own--by clicking here. You can find out more about the exhibitions by clicking here and here.

Thanks so much to friend and Morbid Anatomy Art Academy Instructor Marie Dauhiemer for sending this along!

Images top to bottom: All by Rosamond Purcell drawn from the New York Times slide show, and presumably featured in the book and exhibition:

1. A spider crab (Libina canaliculata), collected by Joseph Leidy in Atlantic City.
2. Black-backed kingfishers (Ceyx erithancus), collected by the ornithologist Rodolphe Meyer de Schauensee in Siam (now Thailand), 1937-38.
3. Cone shells collected for the museum from Tanzania, Dutch New Guinea and the Palau Islands by A.J. Ostheimer III during the 1950s.
4. A selection from the butterfly and moth collection of Titian R. Peale, a noted 19th century entomologist.
5. A Ruby-cheeked Sunbird from Borneo, given to the Academy by Thomas B. Wilson in 1846.

"Of Pictures & Specimens: Natural History in Post-Revolutionary and Restoration France," Interdisciplinary Symposium, American Philosophical Society

Another excellent looking symposium! Free and open to the public:

Of Pictures & Specimens: Natural History in Post-Revolutionary and Restoration France
Interdisciplinary Symposium
December 1 - 3, 2011
American Philosophical Society (APS) Museum, Philadelphia

Of Pictures & Specimens: Natural History in Post-Revolutionary and Restoration France is organized by the APS Museum in conjunction with its current exhibition, Of Elephants & Roses: Encounters with French Natural History, 1790 - 1830. The symposium includes French and American scholars, and addresses key ideas raised by the displays in the exhibition. Included are presentations exploring how Empress Josephine became shepherdess, botanist, and estate manager, how top scientists and artists pictured nature, and how natural science influenced everything from Balzac's novels to the 19th century's romanticized notions of long-lost worlds.

Of Elephants & Roses celebrates the life sciences during a time when Paris was the center of natural history in the Western world. On view are more than sixty objects from France never before seen in the U.S., including Josephine's black swan, gorgeous renderings of flowers on Sèvres porcelain, a mastodon fossil bone sent by Thomas Jefferson to Paris, an herbarium specimen of the flowering Franklinia tree, and everyday objects decorated with charming images of a giraffe who walked 550 miles across France to greet the king.

For information on speakers and program: apsmuseum.org/symposium
For online registration, required by Nov. 28, 2011: apsmuseum.org/registration

SYMPOSIUM IS FREE OF CHARGE
The symposium is made possible through generous funding by the Richard Lounsbery Foundation.

More on this symposium can be found here.

The Biologically-Inspired Glass Work of Danish Artist Steffan Dam

Wow. I have just come across the exquisite, biologically-inspired glass work of Danish artist Steffan Dam. The work--organized into series titled "Flower Blocks," "Specimen Blocks," "Fossils" and "Marine Biology--reminds me quite a bit of the work of revered natural history artists Ernst Heackel and Leopold and Rudolf Blaschka.

Above are just a few of my favorite pieces; I highly encourage you to visit the website to see the full collection by clicking here; you can also download a PDF catalog of his work by clicking here.

Via Wunderkammer.

Lecture: Mark Dion, "My Taxidermy Taxonomy," Museum of Natural History, London, Darwin Center, Thursday May 12

My good friend Petra Lange-Berndt at University College London would like to invite all of you London-based folks out there to a free and fascinating sounding lecture--as part of an equally fascinating sounding series--by one of my favorite contemporary artists, Mark Dion.

Full details on both the lecture and the series follow; hope you can make it!

"My Taxidermy Taxonomy"
Mark Dion (Visual Artist, USA)
Venue: Museum of Natural History, London, Darwin Center, Attenborough Studio
Time: Thursday, 12 May 2011, 5pm
The lecture is free and open to all - but please phone to book tickets on
+44 (0)20 7942 5725

Mark Dion is one of the world's foremost ecological artists. He is best known for investigating and intervening into the cultures of natural history collections through site-sensitive installations. In this slide lecture Dion will examine the ways in which dominant ideologies and public institutions shape our understanding of history, knowledge, and the natural world. The artist will address more specifically the politics of taxidermy, the preservation of animal skins, and its many practices. What kind of stories, curiosities and oddities can be unearthed from the archives of the natural history museum? How is taxidermy linked to extinction and colonialism? And what is the role of the museum in contemporary society?

This lecture is part of the AHRC Research Network "The Culture of Preservation" series, at the UCL History of Art Department, run by Petra Lange-Berndt and Mechthild Fend in collaboration with the Natural History Museum London, The Hunterian Museum, and the Grant Museum of Zoology, London.

More about this series:
Prepared specimens appear in many guises: as monstrous or typical organs preserved in formaldehyde and kept in glass jars not unlike pickled food, as stained and fixed tissue slices, or as skilfully arranged stuffed animals. They may be found in cabinets of curiosities, in the laboratories of histologists, in anatomy theatres or in natural history collections, but nowadays equally in art galleries and the shop windows of fashionable boutiques. This project is concerned with such kinds of preserved natural objects, in particular with anatomical wet preparations and taxidermy. It explorses the hybrid status of these objects between nature and representation, art and science and studies their fabricaton, history and display.

Events

Workshop 1: Taxidermy: Animal Skin and Colonial Practice
12 May 2011, 5pm
Keynote Lecture – free and open to all but please telephone to book tickets on +44 (0)20 7942 5725 –

Mark Dion (Artist, New York and Pennsylvania),
My Taxidermy Taxonomy, Museum of Natural History, London, Attenborough Studio

13 May 2011 Workshop

Workshop 2: Wet Preparations: Anatomy, Pathology and the Body Contained

9 June 2011, 6 pm Keynote Lecture – free and open to all –

Nick Hopwood (Historian of Science, University of Cambridge), Human embryos: bottled, sliced and frozen, Hunterian Museum at the Royal College of Surgeons

10 June 2011 Workshop

For further information please contact Mechthild Fend m.fend(@)ucl.ac.uk or Petra Lange-Berndt p.lange-berndt(@)ucl.ac.uk

The network is a collaboration between the UCL History of Art department, UCL collections, in particular the Grant Museum of Zoology, the Hunterian Museum, London and the Natural History Museum London.

The lecture is free and open to the public, but you will need to make reservations; you can do so by calling +44 (0)20 7942 5725. You can find out more about the event and the series by clicking here.

Image: Mark Dion: An Account of Six Disastrous Years in the Library for Animals (detail), Installation at the Centrum Sztuki Wspólczesnej, Zamek Ujazdowski, Warsaw 1992

"Proteus" Screening with Film Maker David Lebrun, Observatory, April 1st

This April Fools Day, why not join Morbid Anatomy and Observatory for a screening of one of our absolute favorite films, Proteus, featuring an introduction by--and Q and A with--the film's maker, David Lebrun, in a rare East Coast appearance?

The film Proteus details the biography and struggles of biologist and artist Ernst Haeckel (1834-1919) who, as the copy for the film describes, "found himself torn between seeming irreconcilables: science and art, materialism and religion, rationality and passion, outer and inner worlds." Lebrun tells Haeckel's tale with inventive and almost chillingly beautiful animation constructed almost entirely from 19th Century archival images, with the most stirring and awe-inspiring sequences created from quick successions of scores of Haeckel's astonishing depictions of protista, as seen above in some of his drawings, and in the video clip at about 5:10 minutes in.

We are thrilled to be hosting two screenings of the film, one at 7 PM and one at 9 PM, in conjunction with Proteus Gowanus Interdisciplinary Gallery and Reading Room. Film maker David Lebrun will be on hand at each to introduce the film and to answer any questions you might have.

Please pass this on to any interested parties, and hope very very much to see you there!

Date: Friday, April 1
Time: 7:00 PM and 9:00 PM (2 Screenings)
Admission: $5
Presented by Morbid Anatomy in partnership with Proteus Gowanus

The ocean is a wilderness reaching 'round the globe, wilder than
a Bengal jungle, and fuller of monsters, washing the very wharves
of our cities and the gardens of our sea-side residences.
-- Henry David Thoreau, 1864

For the nineteenth century, the world beneath the sea played much the same role that "outer space" played for the twentieth. The ocean depths were at once the ultimate scientific frontier and what Coleridge called "the reservoir of the soul": the place of the unconscious, of imagination and the fantastic. Proteus uses the undersea world as the locus for a meditation on the troubled intersection of scientific and artistic vision. The one-hour film is based almost entirely on the images of nineteenth century painters, graphic artists, photographers and scientific illustrators, photographed from rare materials in European and American collections and brought to life through innovative animation.

The central figure of the film is biologist and artist Ernst Haeckel (1834-1919). As a young man, Haeckel found himself torn between seeming irreconcilables: science and art, materialism and religion, rationality and passion, outer and inner worlds. Through his discoveries beneath the sea, Haeckel would eventually reconcile these dualities, bringing science and art together in a unitary, almost mystical vision. His work would profoundly influence not only biology but also movements, thinkers and authors as disparate as Art Nouveau and Surrealism, Sigmund Freud and D.H. Lawrence, Vladimir Lenin and Thomas Edison.

The key to Haeckel's vision was a tiny undersea organism called the radiolarian. Haeckel discovered, described, classified and painted four thousand species of these one-celled creatures. They are among the earliest forms of life. In their intricate geometric skeletons, Haeckel saw all the future possibilities of organic and created form. Proteus explores their metamorphoses and celebrates their stunning beauty and seemingly infinite variety in animation sequences based on Haeckel's graphic work.

Around Haeckel's story, Proteus weaves a tapestry of poetry and myth, biology and oceanography, scientific history and spiritual biography. The legend of Faust and the alchemical journey of Coleridge's Ancient Mariner are part of the story, together with the laying of the transatlantic telegraphic cable and the epic oceanographic voyage of HMS Challenger. All these threads lead us back to Haeckel and the radiolaria. Ultimately the film is a parable of both the difficulty and the possibility of unitary vision.

DAVID LEBRUN has served as producer, director, writer, cinematographer, animator and/or editor of more than sixty films, among them films on the Mazatec Indians of Oaxaca, a 1960s traveling commune, Tibetan mythology and a year in the life of a Maya village. He edited the Academy-award winning documentary Broken Rainbow, on the Hopi and Navajo of the American Southwest. Proteus premiered at Sundance and has won numerous international awards. The two-hour documentary feature Breaking the Maya Code (2008) tells the story of the 200-year quest to decipher the hieroglyphic script of the ancient Maya of central America; a drastically shortened version was broadcast on the PBS series NOVA and has been seen on television around the world. His experimental and animated works include the animated films Tanka (1976) and Metamorphosis (2010), works for multiple and variable-speed projectors such as Wind Over Water (1983), and a 2007 multimedia performance piece, Maya Variations, created in collaboration with composer Yuval Ron. Lebrun has taught film production and editing at the California Institute of the Arts and has curated numerous art exhibitions. He was president of First Light Video Publishing from 1987-1996, and since then president of Night Fire Films. He was a founding Board Member of the Center for Visual Music (CVM) and is on the Advisory Board of the Chabot Space & Science Center’s Maya Skies project. For a complete biography and filmography, please visit www.nightfirefilms.org.

You can find out more about the film by clicking here, and more about this event on the Observatory website by clicking here; you can access these events on Facebook here (7 PM) and here (9 PM). You can get directions to Observatory--which is next door to the Morbid Anatomy Library (more on that here)--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.

Images: From Ernst Haeckel's Die Radiolarien, Berlin, 1862. And special thanks to Ben Cerveny for turning me onto this wonderful film so many years ago.