Karen Ingham is into "anatomical theatre"

 the Professor Moxham essay- my initial summary and in red my ideas of how we might present it in a fun way. maybe we split the class in half to do a debate!

Karen Ingham is into "anatomical theatre" - both past and present. She longs for the return of a time when art, anatomy, art, astronomy and  alchemy happily interconnected. She feels that White and Wright show that this can still be true.

my feeling is yes, but looking more broadly  today they are not only discrete disciplines as she says, they are usually oppositional. we could stage a debate with one half of the room being artists aiming to do anatomy theater and the other end are skeptical anatomists. this reminds me of the work of Kristo which was as much about getting permission as doing the grand work itself.



She says contemporary artists  are re-invigorating notions of the Baroque, that is the examination of allegory which is perceived as something ‘other than itself (…) one text read through another’ - and in particular photography where we make images but people know pics can be faked.

The "anatomical theatre" is influenced by hierarchies of power and surveillance. She says her
anatomical collaborations stimulate and question the idea "what it is to be human?" and keeping to allegory uses images to tell a story and teach a lesson.



I wonder how true this is - yes in the past it showed this, but today TV shows about hospitals may be illustrating more - and the real power (at least in America) is big pharma but that is not mentioned at all. And what does White (taking his DNA to make pointillism of his face), say about anything? yes we know that science can dissect us but even as she writes, if we look too close we lose all the holistic meaning. So if White is just saying - " hey look too close and you lose the meaning" - ok - but we knew that already. maybe the experience itself of his art makes you feel it more deeply. I'd need to see it to say


Ingham is into Rembrandt’s "The Anatomy Lesson of Dr Nicolaes Tulp" (1632) as Tulp ’s gesturing hand demonstrates the physiological mechanism of the corpse’s hand. But admits this is just allegory as in a real anatomy lesson you'd never start with the hand, the painting is not a ‘lesson’ but an allegory.

"the anatomy lesson paintings are not about the portrayal of medical reality"

then what are they about?

let class comment

my feeling is that they show something about the ones doing the dissection and in Moxham’s anatomy lesson we see the times have changed:
1. the instruments of dissection are digital, not surgical.
2. teaching monitor a ‘real’ image of re-constructive hand surgery can be seen,(we must acknowledge the anatomist’s maxim ‘know thyself ’ by taken someone else apart!)
3. She has a woman as one of the medical observers, and the body is not of a criminal
4. She staged it in a real operating theater, with smell of formaldehyde and working anatomists present

Ingham feels our knowledge of how the design of a space significantly influences the nature of the acts that occur within – a kind of ergonomics of anatomy.  [I wonder how true that really is?]

She talks about signals of hierarchy in the paintings, still true today that we live in hierarchy. so what that The Anatomy Lesson at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts, Paris where the model took the place
of the cadaver, and artists were seated closer according to experience and social status.   "The Anatomy Lesson of Dr. Sebastiaen Egbertsz" where the body is barely visible, and it's all about surgeons posturing for posterity, or the work of Kotting which raises ideas of male dominated science reducing the female body to little more than a "cipher or fetish, primed for de-coding and display as an allegory of the mastery of male science."

yes i suppose that the reproductive rights debate in US congress was all men and so we still have this issue - but not sure painting is the best way to address this - drama or comedy

And anyway most artists fled figurative painting and drawing  for abstraction and so now that medical imaging technologies such as MRI , CAT scans, and  electron microscopes re-attracted them as the images were abstract again. But her point is that with modern tech we don't need to slice up the body to see it, but we forget and want to forget that slicing gave us the understanding and shaped our society. she writes "But as the interest in ‘virtual body’ projects suggests, in our celebrity-saturated, youth- and perfection-obsessed society, we have become a culture where death is eschewed, and the ‘real’ is disavowed in favour of its representation."

So again, might be fun to have the class divided and debate - the issues raised by

1) Helen Chadwick depicting an allegorized womb but integrating actual fertilized human eggs discarded by the IVF unit due to possible flaws.
2) The work of Wright - potentially exploitative situation - Ingham says her work empowers those missing limbs. is that true? Certianly it raises new ideas about normality.


Ingham  writes " virtual ‘realities’ no more guarantee truth, objectivity, and control than do non-digital means of investigation and representation." and as proof she recognizes the brain can do so much but hardly reducible to a bunch of cells to get the real gist (and gift) of the thing

is this true? we could debate this. I agree that knowing which parts of brain light up doesn't really tell you anything about the expereince of beign human, but with VR you can get scale (zoom into a cell or out to the galaxy)


The "theatre of anatomy" used to be about the drama of life and death - now it's all digital, mere pixels.

i say that once this happened, and the issues of hierarchy became clear - the esssence of theatre of anatomy died on the table. if you want to talk about big pharma - that's the real life and death. or health isurance issues. or that we spend more money fighting baldness than real disease. or does a society spend reousrces to fight rare disease? what about pharma for Africa??? Those are the "meaty" issues - and where the real drama of theater is occurring. Or that we are not our bodies. she hardly if at all touches on this - the work of Wright and White enhance this notion but it is more dramatic to question it.


She says that Alexa Wright (ambutee photos) and Neal White (his DNA code is pointellist version of his face) demonstrates, the theatre of the body is still exciting and a "space where power and knowledge continue to be brokered and negotiated, and a space where art and bioscience may find a creative dialogue that furthers our understanding of what it is to be human."

But I feel that White doesn't do that and Wright might do it, and addresses what is normal and not normal and how we assume that - and art that helps people is nice - but doesn't address the bigger issues in the current theater of anatomy - that being played out on a global scale where money is now the central villian and perhaps hero on the stage.