Turn on the news most days and it looks as if we live in a time and place unusually consumed by the specter of disaster. Recent images of California’s uncontrollable wildfires, collapsed bridges, the inevitable consequences of environmental devastation—as well as the almost daily reporting of suicide bombings and the promise of future attacks—all contribute to an atmosphere of imminent doom here in the early 21st century. Images of calamities—whether natural or man-made—play a strange yet pivotal role in our lives.
And the media is only part of the picture. Whether registered in the popular imagination through apocalyptic literature or hyperreal thrillers adopted as Hollywood films, it’s easy to imagine that the spectacle of disaster has had a longstanding impact on North American’s consciousness and the development of Western culture. In my most recent digital work The Disaster Series (exhibited at the Patrick Mikhail Gallery in October), I wanted to explore the human experience of disasters and our abiding fascination with them.
This series builds on my own fascination with the way Classical medical depictions of the human figure (observed in rare 19th-century anatomical atlases) were persistently represented as neither solely dead nor alive. In many ways these animated dissected bodies seem symbolic and allegorical rather than exclusively objective. Indeed, some of these figures have been represented as being mid-way through the dissection process; they gesture as if still alive, their eyes frequently alert and wide open or softly shut, as if asleep.
I became interested in the way that artists and anatomists of this era did more than simply record anatomical facts: they dramatized, travestied, beautified, and moralized them. I found myself questioning the politics of scientific reasoning and wanting to further interrogate how these visions into the interior of the 19th-century body were complex and highly stylized encoded languages.
I also began to question how various disasters and calamities impacted on the development of Western science’s empirical investigations and notions of “progress.” I wanted to consider if it was possible to re-read the modernist project of anatomy as the result of fears and phobias instead of only enlightened reasoning and “truth.”
I chose to experiment with the imagery of disasters scenes reproduced in popular 19th-century illustrated publications such as The Illustrated London News and The Graphic to see if these catastrophic images could be inserted, embedded and layered into an existing scientific agenda. The Disaster Series suggests the possibility that human tragedies, losses, and sufferings might actually lodge themselves somewhere deep inside our anatomies, deep inside ourselves. In this regard, the images function as an obvious alternative to the supposedly transparent regimes of modern medical imaging technologies such as X-rays and M.R.I. images.
The peculiar prominence and resonance of disasters signals not only our past crisis-oriented imagination but also our present condition. In another uncanny turn, perhaps these distraught medical mannequins stand in for the present-day subject who, due to our current culture of calamity and its own obsessive specters of disaster, has no choice but to be caught posing, acting and feeling half alive as well as half dead.
Notes on The Disaster Series
The Disaster Series are ultrachromium prints on lustre paper and appear courtesy of the Patrick Mikhail Gallery.
Anatomical drawings from the series originally appeared in A System of Anatomical Plates of the Human Body, Accompanied with Descriptions and Physiological, Pathological, and Surgical Observations by John Lizars.
THE DISASTER SERIES: Burning of the Yankee clipper, Golden Light - February, 1853
The "Golden Light" sailed from Boston for San Francisco, February 12th, 1853. On the 22nd, during a thunderstorm she was struck by lightening and set on fire. With its American flag flying from the central mast, a lithograph by renowned 19th-century ship illustrator Nathaniel Currie depicts “Golden Light” engulfed in flames.
THE DISASTER SERIES: Burning of the Houses of Assembly, Montreal – April 25, 1849
In the Spring of 1849, a British mob protesting the Royal Assent of the Rebellion Losses Bill overtook the Legislative Assembly and the sessions of the Second Parliament of the Province of Canada in Montreal. The protestors saw the Bill as French domination of the Union. The Parliament building and almost everything in it was devastated by fire. The wood engraving of the burning of the Houses of Assembly by Martin Somerville appeared in The Illustrated London News on May 19, 1849.
THE DISASTER SERIES: The Prince Frederick William drifting ashore in Calais Harbour – March 12, 1859
The iron sailing steam ship “The Prince Frederick William” was named after the future German Emperor and King of Prussia. This engraving of the vessel appeared after it struck the pier in the French harbour at Calais: it was printed in The Illustrated London News on March 12, 1859.
Cindy Stelmackowich teaches art history at Ottawa's Carleton University.
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