November 23, 2014 - 22:07
Great conversation w/ John Muse before Riva arrived; he suggested that the visual artist’s reliance on “the narrative” (to fill in the “missing self”) can have the effect of diminishing the power and wonder of the image itself, and suggested Stephen Greenblatt’s chapter on “Resonance and Wonder” as a good source for thinking more about this idea. A good exhibit evokes both the large context (“resonance”) and the immediate astonishment (“wonder”) (the clearest example of this I’ve encountered recently was the Shonibare exhibit @ the Barnes last spring).
Riva began by asking us to look @ the opening exhibit, “Grimms’ Anatomy,” which she found very significant as an introduction to the museum, because it asked us to consider the “extraordinary” bodies of fairy tale characters. We talked about the history of Cinderella’s small feet in the Chinese practice of foot-binding, in which “the ultimate privilege was to be disabled”: wealthy enough to be carried around because your feet had been bound and you could not walk. The bound foot was “a sexual fetish, deformed enough to become ‘cuplike’ (need I say more?” Riva asked).
Riva decided to make this visit into a detailed anatomy lesson; it struck me that she was trying to put the museum to its original use, for anatomical training, rather than in its more current role as “freak show” (one exhibit was entitled “Broken Bodies and Suffering Spirits,” and the sign out front advertised a “Disturbingly Informative” show). I was struck throughout Riva’s lecture by the language; she spoke, for example, of “unerupted” teeth, and of a socket for “latent” incisors. We learned that the process of “sexing a skeleton” starts with looking at the shape of the pelvic outlet, and of the ilium, “the butterfly wing bones,” the “large bowl support” in the back for carrying a child. “The female pelvis was made to supportive but mobile.” The major muscular strength of ciswomen is below the waist, that of cismen above it.
We moved on to another case with shockingly out-of-date descriptions of racial characteristics (harder to track “as the human race has migrated and melded”), and to another that described the museum as preserving a “pre-bacterial, pre-genetic conception of disease and pathology,” a “unique record of conditions now rare, due to nutrition, sanitation, therapy, medical practice….”
We spent some time with the wall of skulls, puzzling over the notation “saved by” (ah, “adopted”?), and also by the various notations of causes of death: “suicide due to an unfaithful mistress,” “hanged because of an unhappy love affair, “ “cut throat because of extreme poverty,” “deheaded.”
When we went downstairs, we were all disturbed by the large case containing “Mary” (who was a little person), the head of her stillborn child, “the Kentucky giant,” and “a normal” skeleton. Riva said, “I have utmost respect for these people,” and expressed how offensive she found it to “mount a skeleton like that,” with “tongs in the skull.” “Ask yourself,” she said, “what is the life you are looking at?”
Then we moved to the wall of fetuses in jars, and to another with a line-up of baby skeletons, and to some exhibits of conjoined twins. “What is the person at the museum trying to do with this?” Riva asked.
And then we arrived at the examples of spina bifida: “Here are my people, some of them…This is my body, my exact disability,” she said.
We gathered in a classroom to reflect on what we had seen, and how we had seen it.
John asked, “This exhibit assumes a viewer who…what?”
“Values most the story of the person whose body is displayed here?”
“Doesn’t care about the people attached to the parts on display?”
“Is looking for what differentiates them from the specimens?”
Riva described “the collector’s ethos”: “wanting the viewer to be impressed with the depth, breath, rarity, idiosyncrasy of your collection, with how much variation it displays.”
We noted that there were remarkably few names of the people who were once attached to the bodies on display. Many of the narratives that were attached were instead about the doctors who operated on these bodies, or about those who collected them. (A “god complex”?)
Riva is interested in anatomy, in part, because it helps her “get at a subjective sense of the self.” What did we learn from this exhibit? Some of it was “nauseating.” Some of it was a “wonder cabinet”: babies in jars: for consumption, for entertainment. There was “shame attached to the body”; it was about “separation and vilification.”
The museum about “making us feel untouched.” The narrative framing of the fairy tale “justified our looking.” But what justifies our looking after that? Curiosity? The desire for “visual consumption”? “I cannot think of a way to justify this.” These are “extraordinary bodies, detached from lived experience.”
Riva was clear that she is “not against human display.” She believes in the “democracy of knowledge,” which includes “letting people understand how our bodies work.” But she invited us to “think about alternative versions of this place.”
It is “not set up as a learning place. How might we encounter variant bodies in a better way?” How might we learn “what living in that body felt like?” How might the people whose bodies are on display “take ownership of their own biographies”? One way to do this would be without comparison, as in the “horrifyingly emblematic case” of putting Mary and “the Kentucky Giant” in a single large container with the “jarring” comparison of “the indispensible ‘normal body.’”
How might the museum help its viewers relate to the specimens as people?
It’s a collection of abnormalities, all bizarre and extreme. It doesn’t recognize that no body is regular. “What would your label say, if you were in the museum?” “As Riva described the pelvis structures of the skeletons, I felt alienated from my own body.” Because all the bodies here are “enfreaked,” the exhibit made us feel detached from our own bodies.
All bodies are unique. Nobody resembles anybody else. But medical students are not taught the unbelievable variation of in bodies. With the increasing use of digital anatomy, medical culture is now about the study of an aggregate of statistical variations.
This place does recognize that anomaly is at the heart of medicine.
We all want narrative. But a lot of medicine is based on detachment; doctors are taught to intervene without an emotional reaction, to be analytical and rational. What’s the difference between “good detachment” (which helps us learn) and “bad detachment” (which shuts us down)? What causes “armoring,” what the renewal of empathy? What experiences lead to good doctoring, what to bad?
Would it disturb you, if every specimen had “an accessible biography”?
This is not a space of reassurance. (“What if that happened to me?”—overheard from a conversation among other visitors.) We are not perfect humans at the risk of danger.
Did it help, when Riva asked us to touch ourselves, to find the spots on our own bodies which mirrored those of the specimens?
On that dehumanizing line-up of baby skeletons, which have “not yet begun to be gravity beings”—their muscles haven’t “built little platforms” to hold up their skulls.
Riva commented on the “ambivalence at the core of this place,” the way they “halfway give you something.”
Riva closed our conversation by asking us to debrief our experiences at Camphill: In terms of relationship formation, what was the effect of doing the portraits? It was an intentional way of getting to know someone, a “device for making a relationship happen.” Like the methods of intentional listening and talking that Monsoon and Benaifer taught us, doing the portraits was a way of getting to know a person, a means of turning looking into a relationship, that highlighted different aspects of self; more than “just speaking,” it was a means of “identifying their identity.” “Portraiture as relationship building” involves more than the actual act of ethical representation. An effect of portraiture was that it gave the villagers the experience of being at the center of someone’s attention.