visualculturist

Nov. 14, 2011 at 12:44pm with 2 notes View comments

Busy bodies

While I have recently pointed out how many New York museums occupy grand old residences, Chicago has only a few — the most obvious being the Graham Foundation and the Richard H. Driehaus Museum. Far more obscure is the International Museum of Surgical Science,

one of three lavish early 20th century mansions on Lake Shore Drive just south of North Avenue. Body of Work, a contemporary art exhibit currently on view there, makes a trip well worthwhile, as much for the contemporary work in the show as for the experience of seeing the interior of the building itself.

Times are tough for museums. Management pressures their marketing staffs to devise new and novel ways to entice visitors. The era of the blockbuster show is likely past, given the outrageous costs of insurance and shipping involved in borrowing and transporting precious works of art. More successful have been the kind of evening events that bring out folks who may not have been to a museum since their last grade school field trip, but who like the idea of hooking up in a “class” environment.

Another tactic for building audiences involves reaching beyond a museum’s usual constituency. For an institution like the International Museum of Surgical Science, that’s not too difficult, because it’s what you’d definitely call a niche collection, similar to a number of quirky museums in Chicago — the Pritzker Military collection, The Museum of Broadcast Communications and the now-departed Peace Museum

IMSS actually has often hosted contemporary artworks in its third floor galleries that complement its holdings — currently a show of sculpture inspired by human organs

With this welcoming environment in mind, SAIC professor Rebecca Keller approached the museum with the idea of mounting an “excavation” installation in which a group of contemporary artists created works that comment on, embellish and enhance the museum’s existing collection.

I’m not sure how common these reflective exhibitions are; I do know that the first time I saw one was Fred Wilson’s outing at the Museum of Contemporary Art in the early 1990s, after he had attracted attention and acclaim for what was a groundbreaking exercise of the type at the Maryland Historical Society. Wilson’s commentary almost always relates to the position of the African American — and more specifically, the African American artist — as it relates to the various artworks and artifacts in a museum’s collection. I remember thinking at the time that a lot of the commentary was a real stretch, and that the exercise seemed a little whiny to me — it was all about persecution and alienation. [Ultimately, though, my impressions were obviously in the minority because he eventually won a MacArthur genius grant.]

The commentary in the Body of Work show doesn’t seem to reflect a similarly personal perspective; mostly it expresses the participating artists’ general impressions about medicine and surgery.

While it’s always a questionable exercise when the curator includes his or her own work in a show, it’s hard to escape the fact that Keller’s contributions are the most salient and interesting.

Her primary piece, “Attributes of the Gods,” comments on the hall of notables — larger than life statues [arrayed around what was the residence’s primary “salon”] of the great figures in the history of medicine — cleverly and pointedly.

She alters the statue of Joseph Lister, the British surgeon who championed the significance of antiseptic surgery, by placing bars of soap at his feet.

For Wilhelm Conrad Röntgen, who discovered x-ray technology, she similarly adds radiological images from the IMSS’ collection

These pieces in particular convey the methodology that Keller and the other artists had to employ in making their work. Although the IMSS museum doesn’t have the kind of obsessive oversight on its collection that you’d find at a museum of art or natural history — where you absolutely cannot touch anything with your bare hands — there were many restrictions on what they were able to do. Here, Keller wanted to impart a sense of godliness to the figures in the room by gilding the platforms that support them. But she couldn’t apply gold leaf directly to the bases themselves — she had to create paper overlays that didn’t actually alter the stone surfaces, which involved a complicated and precise process of template creation.

In the museum’s richly paneled library, Keller’s piece “Knowledge Distillery” assembles laboratory glassware from the museum’s collection into a construction suggesting the distillation of knowledge common to all sciences:

Focusing on the curator’s contributions shouldn’t imply that the other artists’ works aren’t worth seeing.

Ceramic artist Amber Ginsburg’s piece, Knob, is, frankly, about germs. She riffs on the lengths to which people will go to avoid touching a doorknob after they’ve visited a public restroom, with amusing word-based installations in the museum’s facilities.

She also produced ceramic casts of various doorknobs in the museum that visitors were invited to take with them

I also liked Briana Schweizer’s “Life Mask” — a three-dimensional digital image of her face that she displays next to a death mask of Napoleon Bonaparte.

It’s an effective comment on the nature of art — where at its root is all about the life of the artist, irrespective of the ostensible subject matter — but also on the nature of modern media.

I was drawn to Liene Bosque’s scale building models: of the IMSS museum building, designed by Charles Follen McKim for Eleanor Countiss [at right in picture below], and its inspiration. le Petit Trianon [at left], built for Marie Antoinette. It’s amusing and telling that the Countiss house is more or less a copy of the French building, but Mrs. Countiss apparently didn’t feel Marie Antoinette’s residence was grand enough for her, so she insisted on adding an additional story.

And finally, some pure amusement in the series of doctor jokes handwritten and displayed around the galleries:

For me, though, the most compelling reason to see the show is to see the interior of the Countiss house. As I’ve said, before, those robber barons really knew how to live.

A lot of it is about the sheer proportions of the place — pure Beaux Arts