DISSECTED

Cindy Stelmackowich

September 06 – October 12, 2002

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The title of Cindy Stelmackowich’s exhibition, Dissected, implies a process that has taken place, and perhaps something lying prone, open for our perusal. Although we could take its meaning broadly, once we enter the gallery, there is no doubt as to the intended context of the word. We can trace the process of dissection, as a method of gaining medical knowledge, back to the inception of Science and particularly to the Renaissance. Leonardo da Vinci documented several dissections through detailed illustrations. Rembrandt’s The Anatomy Lesson (1630) depicts a man whose arm has been dissected, surrounded by a group of men who are looking on. In a discussion of this painting the late novelist W.G. Sebald makes the point that Dr. Tulp and his colleagues are not looking at the body of Aris Kindt, but rather, “their gaze is directed just past it to focus on the anatomical atlas in which the appalling physical facts are reduced to a diagram, a schematic plan of the human being.” The works of Stelmackowich enable us to consider this collective gaze, averted from the appalling material body to the safety of its representations in text and image, or through text as image, in Suspending the Laws of Medical Practice (2002).

Lining one wall of the gallery, this work consists of a series of test tubes suspended in a triangular formation. The test tubes, of 50’s vintage, are held up by large dissecting pins inserted directly into the wall. From afar the tubes seem to contain organic elements, suspended in water, but in fact, on closer inspection, we see they are strips of text, cut from the dictionary – definitions of body parts and organs. These strips of text have visual and functional qualities similar to isolated strands of DNA. Just as DNA is the body writ small, encoded in helix coils, so do the paper strands encode the body in text. Stelmackowich has left the papers within the tubes to fall as they may, allowing for random words on the reverse side of the strips to line up with the medical descriptors. Just as DNA is only a parts list, falling where it may into the nurture of its environment, so are these words open to new meanings as unintended juxtapositions take precedence.

In the companion piece to the test tubes there are also strings of text, but this time they are suspended in a pool of water contained in a large round-bottomed vessel. The vessel itself is enclosed in a table so that its bulk protrudes below, seemingly defying gravity. The top of the vessel is hidden by a dictionary into which a hole has been cut, so that we can view the floating textual bits and pieces through the top of the table. Looking through the authority of the book into the pond-like belly of its dissected parts, we are suspended in a time where the rate of change, whether it be in pharmaceuticals or biotechnology, renders medical science beyond the law. The cheeky presentation, with cut paper masquerading as biological subject, inserts whimsy and fictions into the gallery posing as laboratory.

Stelmackowich carries this humour into her book works. In Diseases of the Eye (2001) a book stands in a kidney shaped medical basin, partly immersed in what appears to be some kind of bodily fluid that is actually congealed varnish. The book is splayed open to a picture of someone having their eyes flushed. In another piece, handbook of surgery (2001) various elements from medical practice protrude from a small red book of the same name. Dissecting pins, a surgical glove, a tracheotomy tube and anatomical illustrations suggest a science fiction narrative where text becomes form and begins to move outside the confines of the pages. This strategy of animation is carried over into the Dictionary Series (2001). Using glass beads, Stelmackowich expands on medical illustrations of organs. The pages themselves are on large sheets of marbled paper, which resemble our fantasy of an internal landscape. The beads themselves spill out of the illustrations and onto the paper. The lung, the kidney, the eye and the ear have been given this treatment, but the visceral nature of the drawings is undermined by the painstakingly crafted beadwork. This contrast marks Stelmackowich’s critique of the social power of medicine, both serious and precious, disturbed and fascinated. Perhaps she joins the rest of us in our morbid fascination with the material body.

The marbled paper with the traveling beads animates the image of traveling into the body. Kim Sawchuk coined the term biotourism to describe this phenomenon. Using the 1966 Richard Fleischer film Fantastic Voyage as a point of departure she describes a desire to travel inside the body, into that space that Foucault referred to as the “dark, concave, inner side.” Sawchuk states, “ This desire and longing is a paradox of our culture. It is fueled by the desire to know what is happening inside and see the inner body at work, yet it is predicated upon technological intervention.” The tools of Instruments and Dissections (2002) could perform or have performed that intervention. In this work a display of surgical instruments is laid out on a table, which resembles one found in a surgical theatre. Each object has a tale to tell of insertions into flesh, of travels on the inside, but they are oblivious to their past and lie there with all their symbolic weight. Two apothecary jars house pop-up illustrations taken from a child’s anatomy book. The apparatuses loom over the table like cartoon bodies, waiting for the instruments to stand up and tell their story.

The stories remain unsaid. We are left with drawings, bits of text, floating beads beckoning us to reconsider the authority of the medical gaze. There is plenty of academic weight in this exhibition. Stelmackowich is a doctoral candidate at SUNY, Binghamton. Her area of research is the relationship of science and knowledge to representation, and the complexity of her work is a bio-travel log of this exploration, as we ponder the mystery of the body. We are all, as both subjects and objects of medical practice, moving back and forth from the body to its representations.

Sebald, W.G., The Rings of Saturn, (New York: New Directions, 1995) 13.
Foucault, Michel, The Order of Things, () 237.
Sawchuk, Kim, “Biotourism, Fantastic Voyage, and Sublime Inner Space”, in Wild Science, (London: Routledge, 2000) 20.

Written by Caroline Langill, August, 2002.