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From gallery to hospital: art in context
Perspectives
the time Faraday was alleged to have said this (1850), there was scarcely any need for satirical defensiveness. Samuel Morse had already developed telegraphy, and plans to lay the first transatlantic cables (sections of which are on display here—and how feeble they look!) were afoot. By 1881 an Exposition Internationale d’Electricité was being held in Paris, featuring Alexander Graham Bell’s telephone, an electric tram designed by Werner Von Siemens, and bright arc lights and bulbs made by Thomas Edison and others. Edison trumped that at the Paris Exposition Universelle in 1900 with an
electrical moving walkway that carried people for over 2 miles along the streets. By then electricity generation was truly coming into its own, and the debate was raging about the relative merits of direct-current and alternating-current sources, favoured respectively by Edison and his one-time employee Nikola Tesla. And there is the name to conjure with. The curators say they wanted also to explore the role of electricity in our imagination, and no one personifies that role better than Tesla—which is why his name is attached to the electric car that today promises to sustain the
utopian electric dream. The exhibition features a signed copy of the famous photo of Tesla—the “New Wizard of the West” as one contemporary article called him—seated calmly in his lab while a spark-storm of Frankensteinian proportions raged around him. It is seldom acknowledged (not here either) that this image was faked. For Tesla, like that other modern wizard Edison, knew that electricity was still a kind of magic, potent enough now to generate not just power but celebrity: a gift, and maybe curse, of the gods.
Philip Ball
Superflex & Gregor Brändli
From gallery to hospital: art in context
Photo PalMed, SUPERFLEX, courtesy of the artists
SUPERFLEX: Hospital Equipment Von Bartha, S-chanf, Switzerland, until March 18, 2017
1000
An ancient stone barn, high in the snow-covered Swiss Engadin, seemed an unlikely setting for an installation by three Danish artists entitled Hospital Equipment. Sharing a background in documentary photography and an interest in sculpture as art students, Jakob Fenger, Rasmus Nielson, and Bjørnstjerne Christiansen have collaborated as SUPERFLEX since 1993. Working as a studio with 15 people, their aim is to use art to prompt societal change. Inside a pristine “white-cube” within the barn is the von Bartha gallery, where a surgical lamp illuminates an operating table and a surgical instruments table. This stark tableau transcends any quotidian displays of equipment at medical trade fairs. Three black and white photographs of the installation, each subtly different, hang on flanking walls. Four articulated sections of the table, which are used for supporting patients’ limbs, are splayed outwards so that the table itself resembles a prone body, hinting at human vulnerability and indeed mortality. Fenger, Nielson, and Christiansen view their artistic practice as providing “tools”, which they have described as “models or proposals that can actively be used and further utilised
and modified by the user”. Their work explores conceptual ideas about art. In 1917, Marcel Duchamp pioneered conceptual art when he designated a “ready-made” manufactured urinal as art—thereafter it remained functionless, cloistered in a museum. SUPERFLEX describes Hospital Equipment as a “readymade, upside down” or Duchamp in reverse. They exhibit surgical aids as art objects, before donating them to
“Art is about gesture, often only symbolic, but we want to activate this symbolism so that it makes a difference.” hospitals in places affected by conflict where their intended functions are fulfilled. After the exhibition in Switzerland, the operating table will be shipped to Salamieh Hospital in Syria, where emergency and elective surgery is provided. After an earlier iteration of Hospital Equipment in Copenhagen, in 2014, its components eventually arrived at Al-Shifa Hospital in the Gaza Strip. SUPERFLEX consulted with local medical relief organisations on the selection of appropriate recipient hospitals and also with surgeons about choices of surgical equipment. “Art is
about gesture, often only symbolic, but we want to activate this symbolism so that it makes a difference”, Fenger told me. This exercise in medical relief will be funded by selling the three unique documentary photographs to art collectors. Neither the artists nor the von Bartha gallery will profit from this artistic philanthropy. SUPERFLEX has a diverse international practice. The French Government has commissioned their development of plant nurseries at two hospitals on Réunion Island and an island in the Mayotte archipelago. Local people there often consult herbalists, but are unable to say which plant remedies they have already tried if they subsequently consult a clinician. “As well as plant identification the nurseries will provide a focus for collecting botanical knowledge and forge a link between two medical cultures”, says Fenger. For SUPERFLEX, the context of their artistic practice is more important than generating commercial value. In a gallery Hospital Equipment is an artwork, but in an operating theatre it becomes a life-saving tool. In this context collectors fulfil altruistic roles, as well as their usual acquisitive ones.
Colin Martin www.thelancet.com Vol 389 March 11, 2017
the time Faraday was alleged to have said this (1850), there was scarcely any need for satirical defensiveness. Samuel Morse had already developed telegraphy, and plans to lay the first transatlantic cables (sections of which are on display here—and how feeble they look!) were afoot. By 1881 an Exposition Internationale d’Electricité was being held in Paris, featuring Alexander Graham Bell’s telephone, an electric tram designed by Werner Von Siemens, and bright arc lights and bulbs made by Thomas Edison and others. Edison trumped that at the Paris Exposition Universelle in 1900 with an
electrical moving walkway that carried people for over 2 miles along the streets. By then electricity generation was truly coming into its own, and the debate was raging about the relative merits of direct-current and alternating-current sources, favoured respectively by Edison and his one-time employee Nikola Tesla. And there is the name to conjure with. The curators say they wanted also to explore the role of electricity in our imagination, and no one personifies that role better than Tesla—which is why his name is attached to the electric car that today promises to sustain the
utopian electric dream. The exhibition features a signed copy of the famous photo of Tesla—the “New Wizard of the West” as one contemporary article called him—seated calmly in his lab while a spark-storm of Frankensteinian proportions raged around him. It is seldom acknowledged (not here either) that this image was faked. For Tesla, like that other modern wizard Edison, knew that electricity was still a kind of magic, potent enough now to generate not just power but celebrity: a gift, and maybe curse, of the gods.
Philip Ball
Superflex & Gregor Brändli
From gallery to hospital: art in context
Photo PalMed, SUPERFLEX, courtesy of the artists
SUPERFLEX: Hospital Equipment Von Bartha, S-chanf, Switzerland, until March 18, 2017
1000
An ancient stone barn, high in the snow-covered Swiss Engadin, seemed an unlikely setting for an installation by three Danish artists entitled Hospital Equipment. Sharing a background in documentary photography and an interest in sculpture as art students, Jakob Fenger, Rasmus Nielson, and Bjørnstjerne Christiansen have collaborated as SUPERFLEX since 1993. Working as a studio with 15 people, their aim is to use art to prompt societal change. Inside a pristine “white-cube” within the barn is the von Bartha gallery, where a surgical lamp illuminates an operating table and a surgical instruments table. This stark tableau transcends any quotidian displays of equipment at medical trade fairs. Three black and white photographs of the installation, each subtly different, hang on flanking walls. Four articulated sections of the table, which are used for supporting patients’ limbs, are splayed outwards so that the table itself resembles a prone body, hinting at human vulnerability and indeed mortality. Fenger, Nielson, and Christiansen view their artistic practice as providing “tools”, which they have described as “models or proposals that can actively be used and further utilised
and modified by the user”. Their work explores conceptual ideas about art. In 1917, Marcel Duchamp pioneered conceptual art when he designated a “ready-made” manufactured urinal as art—thereafter it remained functionless, cloistered in a museum. SUPERFLEX describes Hospital Equipment as a “readymade, upside down” or Duchamp in reverse. They exhibit surgical aids as art objects, before donating them to
“Art is about gesture, often only symbolic, but we want to activate this symbolism so that it makes a difference.” hospitals in places affected by conflict where their intended functions are fulfilled. After the exhibition in Switzerland, the operating table will be shipped to Salamieh Hospital in Syria, where emergency and elective surgery is provided. After an earlier iteration of Hospital Equipment in Copenhagen, in 2014, its components eventually arrived at Al-Shifa Hospital in the Gaza Strip. SUPERFLEX consulted with local medical relief organisations on the selection of appropriate recipient hospitals and also with surgeons about choices of surgical equipment. “Art is
about gesture, often only symbolic, but we want to activate this symbolism so that it makes a difference”, Fenger told me. This exercise in medical relief will be funded by selling the three unique documentary photographs to art collectors. Neither the artists nor the von Bartha gallery will profit from this artistic philanthropy. SUPERFLEX has a diverse international practice. The French Government has commissioned their development of plant nurseries at two hospitals on Réunion Island and an island in the Mayotte archipelago. Local people there often consult herbalists, but are unable to say which plant remedies they have already tried if they subsequently consult a clinician. “As well as plant identification the nurseries will provide a focus for collecting botanical knowledge and forge a link between two medical cultures”, says Fenger. For SUPERFLEX, the context of their artistic practice is more important than generating commercial value. In a gallery Hospital Equipment is an artwork, but in an operating theatre it becomes a life-saving tool. In this context collectors fulfil altruistic roles, as well as their usual acquisitive ones.
Colin Martin www.thelancet.com Vol 389 March 11, 2017