thu 28/03/2024

Christine Borland & Kerry Tribe, Camden Arts Centre | reviews, news & interviews

Christine Borland & Kerry Tribe, Camden Arts Centre

Christine Borland & Kerry Tribe, Camden Arts Centre

Dead bodies inspired one artist, compellingly - the other makes dreary film

“As a student at Glasgow School of Art I used to visit the amazing anatomy, zoology and ethnographic collections at Glasgow University,” says Christine Borland. “I couldn’t understand why I was so intrigued, except for the question of how something so awful – so dead – could also be so beautiful. I was trying to unpick my responses, to understand how beauty and death could co-exist.”

Ever since graduating in 1987, she has been unpicking her responses to medical specimens and old bones in installations that attempt to confer dignity on the dead. When she acquired a human skeleton from the internet, she worked with a forensics expert to build up a picture of the deceased and used imaging technology to create a portrait bust of the victim. A young Asian woman, possibly murdered for her organs and bones, was thereby accorded the respect denied her in life.

Borland has been accused of poor taste and dubious morals, but ambiguity increases the potency of her work and encourages one to ponder uncomfortable moral issues. In the past, medical research was frequently carried out on the bodies of executed criminals. Borland’s eerily poetic installation at Camden, Cast From Nature (main picture), was inspired by a fibre-glass cast of a body displayed in Edinburgh’s Royal College of Surgeons. Sir John Goodsir, Head of Anatomy at Edinburgh University, partially flayed the corpse in 1845 and, presumably without irony, titled it From Nature and gave it a pose that mimics the dead Christ in Michelangelo’s Pieta of 1499.

Did he wish, through this extraordinary conceit, to compensate for the indignities meted out to the anonymous man, or did he hope the work would be favourably compared with that of the great sculptor? He evidently considered the figure to be a work of art rather than a medical specimen, which raises questions about the legal and cultural status of human remains.

Borland discovered a plaster cast of the same figure in the basement of Edinburgh’s Medical School, from which she was able to make a mould. For an exhibition at Glasgow Sculpture Studios, she constructed a set resembling a traditional anatomy theatre where audiences would have seen dissections taking place. Viewers were invited to watch a live broadcast of the mould being made in an adjacent room and, although Borland’s model was a plaster cast rather than an actual body, her actions come a close second to Sir John’s original interventions.

Christine_Borland_3Her exhibition at Camden is like the next step; analysis has given way to restitution. Static, lifeless and beautiful, the installation is more like a memorial than a post-mortem examination. Lying on an elegant steel support, the plaster cast throws back its head as though to reveal its flayed neck and abdomen; succumbing to gravity, the arms, legs, skin and loin cloth hang down – limp and lifeless. But the body has acquired a doppelgänger; the room is divided by a plaster curtain as though it were a chapel of rest, and on the other side, a second cast (pictured above) is displayed on a higher support.

It has been turned upside down, which reverses all the downward accents so the head, arms and legs are now raised and the skin and loincloth float upwards. The grimacing mouth seems to have morphed into a beatific smile and the blank eyes appear closed in a euphoric swoon reminiscent of the ecstasy of St Theresa as portrayed by Bernini. Borland’s simple act of reversal has transformed the inertia of death into the weightlessness of flight; apparently hovering on currents of air like a sky diver, the gleaming white cast now resembles an angel soaring through space. One would like to believe that this glorious ascension had released the soul from the unburied body, so that it could take flight and reparation could be accomplished at last.

The film reminded me of experiments in the psychology department of University College London, for which I volunteered in the 1960s

Kerry Tribe’s installation is a pared-down version of an exhibition previously shown at the Arnolfini in Bristol. The American artist uses sound and film installations to explore potent subjects such as memory loss, gagging orders and the erasure of people and events from history. By all accounts, her work can be mysterious, engaging and thought-provoking and, if that is true, this dreary selection fails to do her justice.

CAC_TRIBE_3-low_resSpooling from one projector to another, a film produces two images 20 seconds apart. We watch as a middle-aged man known as patient HM (pictured left) fails to recall past events. In 1953, he underwent experimental surgery for epilepsy with disastrous results; removal of the hippocampus reduced his memory retention to a mere 20 seconds so that since the operation he instantly forgets everything. It is a moving story but, for obvious reasons, HM is not an engaging subject. For all its structural cleverness, the film reminded me of experiments in the psychology department of University College London, for which I volunteered in the 1960s; it was dull work but at least I got paid.

In Milton Torres Sees a Ghost, a length of audiotape travels along the wall between an oscilloscope and a tape recorder. American pilot Milton Torres recalls a UFO sighting over the North Sea in 1957. This is a historic moment, since his mission to destroy the intruder has recently been declassified; but since nothing came of the encounter, the event doesn’t set the heart racing.

The Last Soviet juxtaposes the fate of two cosmonauts. Sergei Krikalev went on a mission to the Mir space station in 1991, just before the USSR collapsed. Chaos on the ground forced him to spend 311 days drifting in space and he returned to find that his home town had been renamed St Petersburg and the Soviet Union had fallen apart. At least he retained his place in history, unlike a cosmonaut from the 1960s whose mission failed; as a result, the mission has been struck from official records and the man erased from photographs. The material is potentially interesting but Kerry Tribe’s dull presentations are like a rewind to the 1970s, when earnest conceptualists frequently equated dreariness with profundity. It makes YouTube seem inviting.

Add comment

newsletter

Get a weekly digest of our critical highlights in your inbox each Thursday!

Simply enter your email address in the box below

View previous newsletters