On Sunday, July 18th, The Morbid Anatomy Library--along with our esteemed neighbors Proteus Gowanus, the Reanimation Library and Cabinet Magazine--will be having a book sale featuring books and overstock from our respective collections! The event is free and open to the public; Full details follow:

Morbid Anatomy Library, Proteus Gowanus, Reanimation Library and Cabinet Booksale
Date: Sunday, July 18, 2010
Time: 12–3 pm
Location: corner of Union and Nevins streets, Brooklyn (directions here)

A book sale featuring books and overstock from the collections of the Morbid Anatomy Library, Proteus Gowanus, the Reanimation Library, and Cabinet Magazine. Perhaps there will also be lemonade...

Hope very much to see you there!

Image: "The human body and the library as sources of knowledge", frontispiece of Tabulae Anatomicae, Early 18th cent., Johann Adam Kulmus; found via the National Library of Medicine's "Images from the History of Medicine;" Larger version found on Bibliodyssey's Flickr set. Featured on this recent post.

LONDON — Less than a month after his 67th birthday, the British advertising magnate and gallery owner Charles Saatchi announced on Thursday that when he retires he intends to give the nation his art gallery here — a 70,000-square-foot space in Chelsea — along with artworks valued at more than $37.5 million.

But the building, in a former military complex known as the Duke of York’s Headquarters near Sloane Square, does not belong to Mr. Saatchi. He rents it from Cadogan Estates, a London developer. (Cadogan Estates said in a statement that it hoped the government would keep the gallery there.) And the British government has not yet accepted the gift, although discussions are in progress, said Ruth Cairns, a spokeswoman for the Saatchi Gallery, who added that she had no timetable for a final decision. Also unclear is when Mr. Saatchi plans to retire, which Ms. Cairns said had not yet been determined. A statement from the two-year-old gallery also said that Mr. Saatchi would receive no tax benefits from the gift.

But if all goes as Mr. Saatchi hopes, the Saatchi Gallery would be renamed the Museum of Contemporary Art, London. And the art, which will include more than 200 works by popular British names like Tracey Emin, Grayson Perry and the brothers Jake and Dinos Chapman, would be given to the government in the care of a foundation that would own the works on behalf of the nation and oversee the gallery in much the same way it has been run.

The aim is to keep the space free to the public, with operating funds coming from individual and corporate sponsorship along with revenue from its restaurant, bookshop and rentals for outside events held there.

The gift would also include artworks that could be sold to acquire other art so that the museum could remain a showcase for the latest works.

Mr. Saatchi did not return a phone call requesting comment. But the gallery said in a statement that he felt it was “vital for the museum to always be able to display a living and evolving collection of work, rather than an archive of art history.”

He began collecting and showing Young British Artists — among them, Damien Hirst, Chris Ofili, Marc Quinn, Rachel Whiteread, Jenny Saville and Ms. Emin — years before they became popular. Mr. Saatchi is also known for buying and selling the work of young artists in bulk, causing the prices of their other works to rise quickly when he buys and fall as quickly when he sells. In 2003 he sold about a dozen of Mr. Hirst’s works back to the artist and his dealer, Jay Jopling, in a deal that was said to be worth around $15 million.

An advertising impresario with a keen eye, Mr. Saatchi has also reached out beyond his gallery to help heighten public awareness of many of his artists. His collection is well known to American museumgoers who saw the traveling exhibition “Sensation: Young British Artists From the Saatchi Collection” at the Brooklyn Museum in 1999. That’s when Rudolph W. Giuliani, mayor of New York at the time, called the exhibition “sick stuff” and threatened to cut city subsidies because Mr. Ofili’s painting of the Virgin Mary included clumps of elephant dung.

Beyond exhibitions at his gallery, Mr. Saatchi has also built a Web site that receives millions of hits a year. Besides showing off his collection, it allows artists who register to post their work and sell it without having to pay a fee to a gallery or dealer. (About 140,000 artists have contributed.) It also has a social-networking component, allowing art students to talk to one another and post their work.

Ms. Cairns said the site would continue under its existing management and that once Mr. Saatchi retired, he would no longer be involved with it.

For years now Mr. Saatchi has had a contentious relationship with the Tate. On Thursday the Tate issued a statement saying it “welcomes the news that the national collection of contemporary art promises to be enhanced in this way.” The statement continued, “We look forward to contributing to discussions about how the collection will be used by the nation in the long term.”

Original article found here

The seed for Thanatopolis was planted in 1983. It was an emotional response to the frustration of I-Park’s founder with the available options offered by the cemetery, funeral home and monument dealer upon the death of a loved one. There had to be a more fulfilling way to honor a special individual in one’s life upon their passing. And, it was felt, there needed to be a greater role for creativity and personalization in this process.
--Why Thanatopolis?, http://www.i-park.org/WhyThanatopolis.html

What is Thanatopolis?
• a special space for creating serious, fitting, moving memorials to individuals from all levels of society, a place where the longing to create and do something meaningful for the deceased can be satisfied
• a physical place, a concept and appropriate imagery for attenuating memory
• a harness/focal point for the agony and creativity unleashed by death
• a natural setting for experimentation in the rituals of interment and memorialization
• a new home for the ‘living memorial’ idea...
--Thanatopolis at I-Park, http://www.i-park.org/Events.html

This just in: A call for artworks from I-Park Arts towards the creation of "Thanatopolis," an alternative, artist-imaged memorial park/space seeking to fill the gap left by empty and irrelevant contemporary memorial practice. Work is sought from visual artists, landscape artists, performance artists and more. Full call for works with all relevant links below; Submission deadline is July 12th.

Thanatopolis at I-Park
I-Park’s major inter-disciplinary project for 2010 is Thanatopolis, an alternative memorial park/space in the advanced conceptual stage of development. I-Park is soliciting memorial-themed proposals in the following fields:

Music Composition/Sound Sculpture
Visual Arts/Environmental Sculpture
Theater/Choreography/Performance Art
Landscape/Garden Design
Architecture
Landscape Architecture

Selected projects will be presented at the Thanatopolis Exhibition on October 2, 2010.

Submission deadline is July 12, 2010.

For a copy of the general Call for Proposals, click here.
For the specialized Call for Entries in the field of Music, click here.
For the specialized Call for Entries in the field of
Performance, click here.
For context, click here for ‘Why Thanatopolis?’
For complete program information, click here.

Image: St. Michael's Cemetary: Foundation of Pensacola.

The space where medicine and art intersects is often … well, weird. And fascinating. That realization is explored in the Morbid Anatomy Blog, written by Joanna Ebenstein, a graphic designer and photographer in Brooklyn, N.Y. One goal, Ebenstein says, is “to bring the art and history of medical museums to the awareness of a wider audience and to frame their artifacts as artistic and cultural objects with as much to say about their makers and the culture their makers inhabited as about medical knowledge...”

The American Medical News--a national trade publication for physicians published by the American Medical Association--just launched a nice little Morbid Anatomy slideshow on their website. If you are interested in seeing a nicely curated selection of images from the greater Morbid Anatomy project, and/or in learning a bit more about the stories behind these artifacts and spaces, I highly recommend you check it out!

You can access the slideshow by clicking here.

These incredible 3D sculptures were created by artist Daniel Crossland. Daniel was born in 1978 in the steel city of Sheffield, England and studied at the Scotland Street Art School where impressionistic, realistic and abstract painting and drawing were taught. He further studied in graphic design and multimedia including 3D and after graduating he worked in the graphics industry producing a variety of work including posters, illustrations, magazines and 3D art. He has worked in the computer games industry for five years on nine successfully published titles before going freelance and now produces cg sculptures, model work, textures and visual effects for tv and film.

To learn more about Daniel Crossland, please visit his site at http://www.pteropus.co.uk

The Carrie Secrist Gallery is pleased to announce our next exhibition, Tehom, a solo show by Italian artist Angelo Musco. Two years in production, the show includes Musco’s photo installation Hadal, which was shown in the 53rd Venice Biennale last summer.The title piece, Tehom, an underwater world populated with tens of thousands of nude bodies, will cover the main wall of the gallery stretching 12 x 48 feet wide. The dialogue between classic art forms and contemporary expressions is one of the main themes of Musco’s photographic work. Using mosaic type panels and photo pieces allows the artist to make the entire gallery a unique underwater world experience.

WHO: Angelo Musco
WHAT: Tehom
WHEN: May 1 – July 10, 2010
WHERE: Carrie Secrist Gallery, 835 W. Washington Blvd. Chicago IL 60607, USA

Original article found here

The following report (and these photos!) just in from my friend Lisa O'Sullivan, who is based in Australia and who kindly offered to spy on the auctioning off of the Owsten collection, an amazing collection of naturalia, decorative arts and curiosities amassed by millionaire Warren Anderson and his now estranged wife. The auction took place last Friday and Saturday in Sydney, Australia and here is what Lisa had to say about the spectacle:

In the end, there were no last-minute invasions from the previous owner of the collection, who had threatened to disrupt the sale. He argued that the auction house Bonhams had seriously undervalued his collection. Looking at some of the final auction prices, he may have had a point. Many pieces went significantly over reserve, especially the taxidermy which had been, often ridiculously*, under valued (*she says, with zero authority, but all the bitterness of a taxidermy enthusiast of limited means - the birds I liked having a reserve of A$400 - $600 but selling at A$6,600 (US$5,768), over 10 times that).

For the pre-auction viewing, the collection was displayed in the overseas ferry terminal at Circular Quay, opposite the Sydney Opera house. This was a good thing, because every so often, my retinas needed a rest, and I could step out for some air and gaze at the harbour for a while (calm, washed out blues, very soothing to the eyes). When we say ferry terminal, this is a cavernous space, designed to deal with the massive cruise ships that descend on Sydney. Despite the scale, it felt absolutely jam-packed with over 1,300 objects, many of them made up into room dioramas, like a version of IKEA, designed for, as my friend Felix said, someone looking to furnish an entire Carpathian Castle all at once.

The room was edged with Japanese suits of armour, standing to attention between cabinets and chests of drawers, all with their obligatory taxidermy on top. Looking around, every available surface seemed to be covered with cases. The taxidermy was very varied, some amazing pieces, next to some very dodgy dioramas, and examples in a bad state of repair. Among the saddest were the little birds with stuffing coming out of their eye sockets where fake eyeballs had fallen out.

Add to this, job lots of boomerangs (I heard one staff member complaining to another that his life had shrunk to a point where it was purely dedicated to counting boomerangs in and out of boxes), art nouveau sculptures jostling with ethnographic masks, castle-scaled wooden furniture and a seemingly endless array of trophy heads.

Rumour had it the interest in the rhinoceros horns and heads was fuelled by their medicinal potential (rhino horn is a traditional Chinese remedy against fever). As trade in these horns is now banned, antique examples are the only legal means of procuring them. In any case, a single horn sold for A$90,000 (US$78,655).

For me the most bizarre heads were the wombat trophies. I always understood the ‘heads on a wall’ to gesture towards the prowess of the hunter (all aspects of unfair advantage aside). Despite my best efforts, it’s hard to picture a ‘man v beast’ hunting scenario that involves wombats (also known as the animals most likely to cause a danger to humans as trip hazards in the dark) and a fight to the death any hunter could be proud of...

And the monkey and cat barbershop? A$24,000 (US$20,975) - A$9,000 over reserve. Time to set up a Morbid Anatomy acquisition fund so we can be ready next time?

Addendum: At the end of the day, the entire Owsten Collection sold for A$12 million - double the auction houses estimate, but still under the A$20 million the owner claimed.

Thanks so much, Lisa, for this awesome report and images! So wish I could have been there myself! It looks (and sounds) even more epic than I had expected! To find out more about the collection and to see more images, you can visit this recent pre-auction post.

All images are from Lisa's visit to the auction pre-sale. You can see the entire set of images (well worth your while!) by clicking here.

A Caravaggio painting considered to be the most valuable work of art in Ukraine was recovered in Germany, two years after it was stolen from a museum in Odessa, Reuters reported. The painting, below, called “The Taking of Christ” or “The Kiss of Judas,” was made by Caravaggio in the early 17th century, and depicts Jesus and his apostles John and Judas as they are being separated by soldiers. It had belonged to a Russian ambassador to France and a Russian prince before it was turned over to the Odessa museum, where it was stolen in 2008. On Tuesday Anatoly Mogylyov, the interior minister of Ukraine, said in a briefing that the Ukrainian and German police had recovered the painting and detained members of a gang that focuses on high-value thefts who had tried to sell the work in Berlin.

Original article found here

Eran Webber is a figurative artist born in Israel in 1980, and currently living in Florence, Italy. At the moment, he is studying and teaching at the Florence Academy of Art Sculpting program.

To learn more about Eran Webber, please visit his upcoming site at http://www.eranwebber.com, or through his facebook page.

This Tuesday! Morbid Anatomy presents at Observatory! Hope to see you there!

Torino:Margolis Performance
A performative exploration of electricity, biomedicine, and spectacle
Date: June 29, 2010
Time: 8:00 P.M.
Admission: $5
Please note: This lecture is paired with an event which took place on Tuesday, June 15; More here.

Tonight, join Observatory as it hosts Torino:Margolis in a three-part performance investigating the rich history of biomedicine, electricity, and spectacle. First, the audience will have the opportunity to control the movement of the performer using neuromuscular stimulation, which sends outside electricity into the performer’s muscle, forcing their muscle to contract and the performer to move involuntarily.

In the second part of the performance, they will use electromyography (EMG) in a sound-based performance. EMG is a way of sensing the electricity produced naturally during muscle contraction when an individual moves voluntarily. However, when the performer is physically manipulated by another person there is no action potential generated, no signal sensed by the EMG, and no change in the sound is produced. In this way you can hear someone’s free will.

In the third portion they will add a vocal component to the EMG “rig” by manipulating sound coming from the vocal cords using neuromuscular stimulation.

Torino:Margolis will then explain the workings of the biomedical tools used in the performance and the audience will have the opportunity to ask questions.

Torino:Margolis is a performance art team that smashes through physical and psychological barriers separating one body from another using invasive electronics and biomedical tools. They explore the idea that the self is transient, elusive and modular by playing with the notion of control and free will. Their extraction of physiological processes concretizes these concepts and presents them as questions to the viewer — not to illustrate the mechanism, but to explore the experience. The team has performed nationally and internationally at New York venues such as Issue Project Room, POSTMASTERS Gallery and Exit Art, the HIVE Gallery in California, and the Bergen Kunsthall Museum in Norway. They have lectured for institutions such as SUNY Stony Brook and the School of Visual Arts. For more information please see http://www.torinomargolis.com.

You can find out more about this here. You can get directions to Observatory--which is next door to the Morbid Anatomy Library (more on that here)--by clicking here. You can find out more about Observatory here, join our mailing list by clicking here, and join us on Facebook by clicking here.

The empty glassine packets can be found in Manhattan, Brooklyn and beyond, scattered on streets and sidewalks with only obscure slogans or graphic images to suggest their former use. At one time they contained heroin and the markings stamped on the packets were meant to differentiate strains of varying purity or provenance.

To some they are crime evidence. Addicts may see them mainly as a vehicle to fulfill a dangerous urge. For a group of artists who have been collecting them they are cultural artifacts that are equally unsettling and compelling.

On Wednesday a weeklong show called “Heroin Stamp Project” organized by seven members of the Social Art Collective is scheduled to open at the White Box Gallery on Broome Street on the Lower East Side. The show, which will include 150 packets picked off city streets, as well as 12 blown-up prints made from them, is meant to examine the intersection of advertising and addiction and provoke questions about how society addresses dependence and disease.

Original Article found here

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Karol Bak is a polish artist currently working out of  Poznan, Poland. He studied at  the Academy of Fine Arts in Poznan and graduated in 1989. His figurative works are inspired by myth and mythology. You can view more of Karol’s work by visiting the links below.

To view more  please visit the following links:

http://www.karolbak.art.pl

http://www.emptykingdom.com

http://www.artistsandart.org

http://www.brainparking.com

Woman Advertising J.M. Dolph, Furniture Maker and Undertaker
W. Peppets Art Gallery, Homer, Michigan
Cabinet card, circa 1877

A peculiar advertising photographic pictorial was devised during the 1870s. Women were posed holding signs heralding businesses, their dresses and bodies decorated with life-size objects related to the business. This woman’s hat is adorned with rings from coffin robes. On her chest, she sports a coffin plate, and above and beneath that plate are handles from a coffin. Around her neck is another coffin plate, and coffin chains and paraphernalia hang from her dress. Furniture makers became coffin makers as a natural extension of woodworking skills. The large frame [on the skirt of her dress] indicates this establishment also made frames.

From the wonderful Sleeping Beauty II - Grief, Bereavement and the Family in Memorial Photography by Stanley B. Burns, M.D.

As posted on Liquid Night and picked up by Turn of the Century.

Friend of Morbid Anatomy, frequent Boing Boing contributer, innovative cultural theorist and all around bon vivant Mark Dery will be giving an illustrated lecture this Friday night, June 18th, at Observatory. Come witness the linguistic pyrotechnics as Dery traces the connections betweeb wax anatomical models, pornographic x-ray fantasies of the 1950s, and x-ray fears of the post-terrorist society in his inimitable fashion. People: I have seen this man speak and it is, I promise, not to be missed!

Full info follows; hope very much to see you there!

The Anatomical Unconscious: X-Ray Specs, Visible Women, and the Eros of the Unseen
An illustrated lecture with cult author and cultural critic Mark Dery
Date: Friday, June 18th
Time: 8:00 PM
Admission: $7
Presented by Morbid Anatomy

What do 18th-century wax “anatomical Venuses” doing a striptease in which they expose their internal organs; cutaway views of the imaginary anatomy of Loony Tunes characters; the X-Ray Specs and Visible Woman toys familiar to boomers; and artist Wim Delvoye’s X-rated X-rays of people performing sex acts have in common?

Mark Dery makes these and other provocative connections in his lecture “The Anatomical Unconscious: X-Ray Specs, Visible Women, and the Eros of the Unseen,” a cultural critique of the eroticizing of the scientific gaze. In his hour-long lecture/slideshow, Dery will touch on the pornographic fantasies that swirled around the X-ray from its inception; adolescent dreams, fueled by comic-book ads for X-Ray Specs, of the potential uses for Superman’s X-ray vision; current fears of the potential for abusive use of airport scanners that penetrate clothing; and the artist Wim Delvoye’s series of pornographic X-rays. He’ll theorize the eros of the X-ray, with digressions into the weird cartoon subgenre of imaginary anatomies (of everything from Star Wars At-Ats to Loony Tunes characters) and premonitions of X-rated X-rays inherent in the baroque medical mannequins on display at the Museum La Specola in Florence, Italy.

Mark Dery (http://www.markdery.com) is a cultural critic. He is best known for his writings on the politics of popular culture in books such as The Pyrotechnic Insanitarium: American Culture on the Brink and Escape Velocity: Cyberculture at the End of the Century. Dery is widely associated with the concept of “culture jamming,” the guerrilla media criticism movement he popularized through his 1993 essay “Culture Jamming: Hacking, Slashing, and Sniping in the Empire of the Signs,” and “Afrofuturism,” a term he coined and theorized in his 1994 essay “Black to the Future” (included in the anthology Flame Wars: The Discourse of Cyberculture, which he edited). He has been a professor in the Department of Journalism at New York University, a Chancellor’s Distinguished Fellow at UC Irvine, a Visiting Scholar at the American Academy in Rome, and, most proudly, a guest blogger at Boing Boing. He writes the Doom Patrol column of cultural commentary at True/Slant (http://trueslant.com/markdery)

You can find out more about these presentation here. You can get directions to Observatory--which is next door to the Morbid Anatomy Library (more on that here)--by clicking here. You can find out more about Observatory here, join our mailing list by clicking here, and join us on Facebook by clicking here.

Image: Tweety Bird skull: Copyright Hyungkoo Lee, all rights reserved.

This beautiful Richard Mcdonald inspired 3D study was created by artist Mariano Steiner. Mariano is a 3D generalist specializing in architecture, products, scenery and characters. He graduated in Animation Design from Anhembi Morumbi University and is employed at Techno Image. Mariano currently resides in Sao Paolo, Brazil.

To learn more about Mariano Steiner, please visit his site at marianosteiner.blogspot.com

These figurative paintings were created by artist John M Collier. John Collier is an oil painter specializing in portraits and subtly narrative figurative pieces. Working from models and photographs, his figures are realistic in dimension, but have a flesh created from thick oil paint that appears to have been forced onto the canvas.

You can learn more about John M Collier and view additional work through his official site at blog.johnmcollier.com

For those of you in or near London, friend, artist, and favorite Observatory presenter Zoe Beloff has a few upcoming engagements in your fair city. I have seen both of these presentations here in New York City and could not recommend them more enthusiastically!

Full details follow; hope you can make it out to see her! You won't be sorry.

The Coney Island Amateur Psychoanalytic Society Dream Films 1926-1972: an illustrated lecture and screening
Date: June 10, 2010 Time: 7pm
Place: Viktor Wynd Fine Art, 11 Mare Street , London E8 4RP

The members of the Coney Island Amateur Psychoanalytic Society were filled with the desire to participate in one of the great intellectual movements of the 20th century: psycho-analysis. Additionally, like the Amateur Cine League (founded the same year), many members wished to tap into the power for self expression afforded by technologies like home movie cameras that were newly accessible to ordinary people. This screening presents a range of their amateur films, which reveal an incredibly brave, unapologetic exploration of their inner lives.

Find out more and book tickets here:
http://www.thelasttuesdaysociety.org/coneyisland.html

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Discipline & the Moving Image - lecture/screening
Date: Friday, June 11, 2010
Time:6:30pm - 9:00pm
Admission Free
Location: Birkbeck Cinema (http://www.birkbeckcinema.com)
43 Gordon Square, London
Obedience, Stanley Milgram, 16mm, 1962, 45 mins
Folie à Deux, National Film Board of Canada, 16mm, 1952, 15 mins
Motion Studies Application, 16mm, ca. 1950, 15 mins

Obedience documents the infamous “Milgram experiment” conducted at Yale University in 1962, created to evaluate an everyday person’s deference to authority within institutional structures. Psychologist Stanley Milgram designed a scenario in which individuals were made to think they were administering electric shocks to an unseen subject, with a researcher asking them to increase the voltage levels despite the loud cries of pain that seemed to come from the other room. Milgram saw his test, conducted mere months after Adolf Eichmann’s trial in Jerusalem, as a way to understand the environments that made genocide possible.

Tonight, artist Zoe Beloff pairs Obedience with two earlier works dealing with psychosocial control: Folie à Deux and Motion Studies Application. The former, one of a series of films on various psychological maladies produced by the National Film Board of Canada in the 1950s, presents an interview with a young woman and her immigrant mother afflicted by shared delusions that manifest when the two are together. The latter is an industrial film purporting to present ways to increase efficiency in the workplace: explaining, for instance, a means to fold cardboard boxes more quickly. In stark contrast to the nostalgic whimsy typically associated with old educational films, Folie à Deux and Motion Studies Application play as infernal dreams of systemic power and sources of surprising, unintended pathos.

The concept of ‘motion studies’ is central to cinema itself. Without the desire to analyze human motion, there would be no cinematic apparatus. But the history of motion studies is freighted with ideology. Its inventor Étienne-Jules Marey was paid by the French Government to figure out the most efficient method for soldiers to march, while his protégé Albert Londe analyzed the gait of hysterical patients. From the beginning, the productive body promoted by Taylorism was always shadowed by its double, the body riven by psychic breakdown. We see this in Motion Studies Application and especially Folie à Deux, where unproductive patients, confined to the asylum, understand with paranoid lucidity that the institution is everywhere, monitoring them always. Obedience stands as a conscious critique of these earlier industrial films, co-opting their form only to subvert them and reveal their fascist underpinnings.

You can find out more about Zoe and her work by clicking here. You can find out more about event number one by clicking here and event number two by clicking here.