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Category Archives: Anatomy

Morbid Anatomy Library Open Hours This Weekend, September 8th and 9th, 11-7, As Part of the Brooklyn Museum’s "Go" Open Studio Project

This weekend--Saturday September 8th and Sunday September 9th--the Morbid Anatomy Library (seen above) will be open from 11-7 as part of the Brooklyn Museum's Go Open Studio Project. So please stop by for a perusal of the stacks, a turn through the drawers, and a conversation with the lovely and very clever Morbid Anatomy Library interns Kelsey Kephart and Dru Munsell.
The Morbid Anatomy Library is located at 543 Union Street at Nevins, Brooklyn, buzzer 1E. To view a map, click here. To For more about the Morbid Anatomy Library and for directions and other such information, click here. For more about the Go Open Studio Project--and to see a full list of participating artists--click here.
Photo of The Library by Shannon Taggart

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"Ecstatic Raptures and Immaculate Corpses: Visions of Death Made Beautiful in Italy" Exhibition Opening Party, This Thursday, September 6






This Thursday, if you are in London or environs, please join Morbid Anatomy and The Last Tuesday Society for a free and gin-drenched opening party for my new exhibition "Ecstatic Raptures and Immaculate Corpses: Visions of Death Made Beautiful in Italy"! Full details follow. Hope very much to see you there!

"Ecstatic Raptures and Immaculate Corpses: Visions of Death Made Beautiful in Italy" Exhibition Opening Party
Date: Thursday September 6
Time: 6:00-8:00 PM
Location: The Last Tuesday Society
Address: ***Offsite at 11 Mare Street, London, E8 4RP
Admission: FREE
Produced by Morbid Anatomy
Click here to download Invitation

This Thursday, September 6, if you find yourself in London town, please join us for an opening party for an exhibition of photographs by Joanna Ebenstein of the Morbid Anatomy Blog, The Morbid Anatomy Library and Observatory with waxworks by Eleanor Crook and Sigrid Sarda.

In her many projects, ranging from photography to curation to writing, New York based Joanna Ebenstein utilizes a combination of art and scholarship to tease out the ways in which the pre-rational roots of modernity are sublimated into ostensibly "purely rational" cultural activities such as science and medicine.Much of her work uses this approach to investigate historical moments or artifacts where art and science, death and beauty, spectacle and edification, faith and empiricism meet in ways that trouble contemporary categorical expectations.In the exhibition "Ecstatic Raptures and Immaculate Corpses" Ebenstein turns this approach to an examination of the uncanny and powerfully resonant representations of the dead, martyred, and anatomized body in Italy, monuments to humankind's quest to eternally preserve the corporeal body and defeat death in arenas sacred and profane.The artifacts she finds in both the churches, charnel houeses and anatomical museums of Italy complicate our ideas of the proper roles of--and divisions between--science and religion, death and beauty; art and science; eros and thanatos; sacred and profane; body and soul.

In this exhibition, you will be introduced to tantalizing visions of death made beautiful, uncanny monuments to the human dream of life eternal. You will meet "Blessed Ismelda Lambertini," an adolescent who fell into a fatal swoon of overwhelming joy at the moment of her first communion with Jesus Christ, now commemorated in a chillingly beautiful wax effigy in a Bolognese church; The Slashed Beauty, swooning with a grace at once spiritual and worldly as she makes a solemn offering of her immaculate viscera; Saint Vittoria, with slashed neck and golden ringlets, her waxen form reliquary to her own powerful bones; and the magnificent and troubling Anatomical Venuses, rapturously ecstatic life-sized wax women reclining voluptuously on silk and velvet cushions, asleep in their crystal coffins, awaiting animation by inquisitive hands eager to dissect them into their dozens of demountable, exactingly anatomically correct, wax parts.

You can find out more about the show here, and view more images by clicking here.

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Congress for Curious Peoples One-Day Symposium: London Edition, Last Tuesday Society, This Saturday, September 8

 This Saturday, September 8, you are cordially invited to join myself and a host of distinguished scholars, makers, and museum folk as we investigate, via a one day symposium termed "The Congress for Curious Peoples," some of the provocative intersections explored in the exhibition "Ecstatic Raptures and Immaculate Corpses: Visions of Death Made Beautiful in Italy," on view at the London-based Last Tuesday Society until the end of the month.

This first ever UK edition of The Congress for Curious Peoples will feature participants from The Wellcome Collection, The Wellcome Library, and The Gordon Museum of Pathology, as well as some of my very favorite artists, thinkers and scholars, and will take on such heady topics as enchantment and enlightenment, or the sublimation of the magical into the rational world; the secret life of objects, or the non-rational allure of objects and the psychology of collecting; and beautiful death and incorruptible bodies, or the shared drive to immortalize the human body and aestheticize death in both medicine and Catholicism, and will

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

Congress for Curious Peoples: London Edition
Date: Saturday September 8
Time: 11am - 5:30 pm
Admission: £15.00 (Tickets here)
Location: The Last Tuesday Society
Address: 11 Mare Street, London, E8 4RP
Produced by Morbid Anatomy

11-12: Introduction by Morbid Anatomy's Joanna EbensteinKeynote panel: Enchantment and Enlightenment (20 minute presentations followed by moderated discussion)

12-1: Lunch

1-2:30 The Secret Life of Objects: The Allure of Objects and the Psychology of Collecting (20 minute presentations followed by moderated discussion)

2:30-3:00 Break

3:00-5:30 Beautiful Death and Incorruptible Bodies: Eternal Life and Aestheticized Death in Medicine and Catholicism (15 minute presentations followed by moderated discussion)

You can find out more by clicking here, and purchase tickets by clicking here.

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Two Conferences on Death, Art and Culture: Calls for Papers

I have just been alerted to two fabulous looking death and culture conferences both of which are now soliciting papers! Full info for each follows. Apply away!

1) Art and  Death: A Series of Three Workshops
1 November 2012, 21 February and 23 May 2013
The Courtauld Institute of Art, Somerset House, Strand, London WC2R 0RN

Call for Papers
Submission by 20 September 2012 for workshop 1 (1 November 2012): Anticipation and Preparation

A series of three workshops will be held at the Courtauld Institute of Art in 2012-2013 to explore the inter-relationship between art and death. These workshops have arisen from an informal group of doctoral students with shared interests in funerary monuments. The workshops will be structured to recognize that the certainty of death is accompanied by the foreknowledge and uncertainty of what may come after, and that visual representations of these phases have varied over time and between countries. The first workshop will focus on the images and objects related to the impact that the certainty of death has on individuals and the community; the second on art in the context of dying, death and burial; and the final one on representations of the perceived fate of body and soul after death, as well as the continuation of a relationship (if only in memory) between the living and the dead.

Subjects for the workshops could include, but are not limited to:

Workshop 1 (1 November 2012): Anticipation and Preparation
•    Death insurance? Religious gifts and foundations
•    Protective objects and amulets
•    Tombs commissioned during a lifetime, testamentary desire and fulfilment
•    Contemplating images of death, warnings to the living
•    The cult of the macabre, images of illness and decay
•    Apocalyptic visions

Workshop 2: (21 February 2013): Death and Dying
•    A ‘good death’
•    War and violence
•    Funerals/Professional mourners
•    Funerary monuments, memorial architecture, cemetery design
•    Post-mortem portraits
•    Images of the corpse in painting, sculpture, film, photography, etc
•    Crucifixion imagery
•    Death in museum collections

Workshop 3 (23 May 2013) Life after Death
•    Images of the soul /resurrected or re-incarnated body
•    Depictions of the afterlife
•    The incorruptible body, saints, relics and reliquaries
•    Remembering the dead, commemoration in art and/or performance
•    The ‘immortality’ of the artist, post-mortem reputations

Format and Logistics:
•    Length of paper: 20 minutes
•    Four papers per workshop
•    Location: Research Forum, The Courtauld Institute of Art
•    Timing: 10am-midday
•    Expenses: funds are not available to cover participants’ expenses

We welcome proposals relating to all periods, media and regions (including non-European) and see this as an opportunity for doctoral and early post-doctoral students to share their research.

Please send proposals of no more than 250 words to: Jessica.Barker[at]courtauld.ac.uk and Ann.Adams[at]courtauld.ac.uk by the following dates:

•    20 September 2012 for workshop 1 (1 November 2012): Anticipation and Preparation
•    10 January 2013 for workshop 2 (21 February 2013): Death and Dying
•    11 April 2013 for workshop 3 (23 May 2013): Life after Death

For planning purposes, it would be helpful to have an indication of interest in the later workshops, in advance of submission of a proposal.

Organised by Jessica Barker and Ann Adams (The Courtauld Institute of Art)

2) Graduate Student Conference: “Death: the Cultural Meaning of the End of Life”
January 24–25, 2013
LUCAS (Leiden University Centre for Arts in Society)

This conference aims to explore how death has been represented and conceptualized, from classical antiquity to the modern age, and the extent to which our perceptions and understandings of death have changed (or remained the same) over time. The wide scope of this theme reflects the historical range of LUCAS’s (previously called LUICD) three research programs (Classics and Classical Civilization, Medieval and Early Modern Studies and Modern and Contemporary Studies), as well as the intercontinental and interdisciplinary focus of many of the institute’s research projects.

The LUCAS Graduate Conference welcomes papers from all disciplines within the humanities. The topic of your proposal may address the concept of death from a cultural, historical, classical, artistic, literary, cinematic, political, economic, or social viewpoint.

Questions that might be raised include: How have different cultures imagined the end of life? What is the role of art (literature, or cinema) in cultural conceptions of death? How might historical or contemporary conceptualizations of death be related to the construction of our subjectivity and cultural identity? What is the cultural meaning(s) of death? To what extent has modern warfare changed our perceptions of death? How is death presented in the media and how has this changed? In what ways has religion influenced our reflections on death and the afterlife?

Please send your proposal (max. 300 words) to present a 20-minute paper to lucasconference2013[at]gmail.com.

The deadline for submissions is November 15, 2012.

For further information on the first workshop, click here. For further information on the second conference, click here. Special thanks to Lisa Kereszi for turning me onto the latter!

Image: Dead Toreador (Torero Mort). Édouard Manet (French, Paris 1832–1883 Paris)

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Immaculate Corpses, The History of Medical Museums, Rogue Taxidermists, and A Congress for Curious Peoples: This Week’s Morbid Anatomy Presents at London’s Last Tuesday Society

Tonight marks the beginning of the Morbid Anatomy residency at London's fantastic Last Tuesday Society; this week, join us for a Granta magazine medicine issue launch; an illustrated lecture by Rogue Taxidermist Robert Marbury and another by Hunterian Museum director Sam Alberti on the history of medical museums; a free, gin-drenched opening party for my exhibition "Ecstatic Raptures and Immaculate Corpses: Visions of Death Made Beautiful in Italy (from whence the above image); and a London-edition of "The Congress for Curious Peoples: a one-day symposium featuring a host of scholars, writers, and practitioners exploring in panels, illustrated lectures and discussion the intersections explored by the exhibition "Ecstatic Raptures and Immaculate Corpses: Visions of Death Made Beautiful in Italy."

More on all events below; and please note: all events will take place at The Last Tuesday Society, 11 Mare Street, London, E8 4RP (map here). Hope to see you at one or more of these terrific events!

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Monday 3rd September 2012
Granta Magazine - Medicine Issue Launch: A Spoonful of Fiction: A Granta Salon
Doors at 6 pm, Show commences at 7 pm.

In this special edition of Liars’ League, actors from the live fiction salon perform stories of addiction, healing and the history of medicine by Rose Tremain and Suzanne Rivecca, as featured in Granta 120: Medicine. Then, writer and broadcaster Colin Grant (Bageye at the Wheel, I & I: Marley, Tosh and Wailer), in conversation with a Granta editor, tells how he pursued and then quit medical school and reads from his new autobiographical novel extracted in granta.com.

Admission price includes a copy of "Granta 120: Medicine and Hendrick's Gin and Tonic."
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Tuesday 4th September 2012
Robert Marbury - Rogue Taxidermy in the Digital Age
Doors at 6 pm, Talk commences at 7 pm

When Robert Marbury was 19 years old, he necked with Ricki Lake on camera. At age 29, he spent a year sailing in Indonesia, where he says his ship was attacked by pirates.Four years later, he was one of the three co-founders of the Minnesota Association of Rogue Taxidermists.

Known as a vegan taxidermist, Robert Marbury documents the existence of little known wild and feral plush animals inhabiting our urban environments. With tongue firmly in cheek, through his Urban Beast Project, Marbury hopes to garner attention and general concern for the plight of such strange creatures. As he describes on his webpage: while most of the Urban Beasts exhibited on his site "have met the end of their species, it is our hope that with exposure and attention many other Beasts will be saved."

Tonight's talk will touch on image sharing, legal limitations, collecting, renewed interest in gaff and travel taxidermy as well as death and the impulse to make contact.

Robert Marbury is an artist from Baltimore Maryland. He is the Director and co-Founder of the Minnesota Association of Rogue Taxidermists.
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Wednesday 5th September 2012
Dr Sam Alberti of The Hunterian Museum on the History of Medical Museums
Doors at 6 pm, Talk commences at 7 pm

In the first comprehensive study of nineteenth-century medical museums, Morbid Curiosities traces the afterlives of diseased body parts. It asks how they came to be in museums, what happened to them there, and who used them. This book is concerned with the macabre work of pathologists as they dismembered corpses and preserved them: transforming bodies into material culture. The fragmented body parts followed complex paths - harvested from hospital wards, given to one of many prestigious institutions, or dispersed at auction. Human remains acquired new meanings as they were exchanged and were then reintegrated into museums as physical maps of disease. On shelves curators juxtaposed organic remains with paintings, photographs, and models, and rendered them legible with extensive catalogues that were intended to standardize the museum experience. And yet visitors refused to be policed, responding equally with wonder and disgust. Morbid Curiosities is a history of the material culture of medical knowledge in the age of museums.

Sam Alberti is Director of Museums and Archives at the Royal College of Surgeons of England, which includes the renowned Hunterian Museum. He is interested in the past, present and future of medical and natural history collections. His books include Nature and Culture: Objects, Disciplines and the Manchester Museum (2009), The Afterlives of Animals: A Museum Menagerie (2011) and Morbid Curiosities: Medical Museums in Nineteenth-Century Britain (2011).
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Thursday 6th September 2012
Opening Reception for "Ecstatic Raptures and Immaculate Corpses: Visions of Death Made Beautiful in Italy" An exhibition of photographs by Joanna Ebenstein with waxworks by Eleanor Crook and Sigrid Sarda.
Free and open to the public
6-8 pm

In this exhibition, you will be introduced to tantalizing visions of death made beautiful, uncanny monuments to the human dream of life eternal. You will meet "Blessed Ismelda Lambertini," an adolescent who fell into a fatal swoon of overwhelming joy at the moment of her first communion with Jesus Christ, now commemorated in a chillingly beautiful wax effigy in a Bolognese church; The Slashed Beauty, swooning with a grace at once spiritual and worldly as she makes a solemn offering of her immaculate viscera; Saint Vittoria, with slashed neck and golden ringlets, her waxen form reliquary to her own powerful bones; and the magnificent and troubling Anatomical Venuses, rapturously ecstatic life-sized wax women reclining voluptuously on silk and velvet cushions, asleep in their crystal coffins, awaiting animation by inquisitive hands eager to dissect them into their dozens of demountable, exactingly anatomically correct, wax parts.

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Saturday 8th September
'Congress for Curious People' One-Day Seminar - London Edition
11am - 5:30 pm

A one day symposium featuring a host of scholars, writers, and practitioners exploring in panels, illustrated lectures and discussion the intersections explored by the exhibition "Ecstatic Raptures and Immaculate Corpses: Visions of Death Made Beautiful in Italy." Themes discussed will include enchantment and enlightenment, or the sublimation of the magical into the rational world; the secret life of objects, or the non-rational allure of objects and the psychology of collecting; and beautiful death and incorruptible bodies, or the shared drive to immortalize the human body and aestheticize death in both medicine and Catholicism. 

11-12:Introduction by Moderator Joanna Ebenstein
Keynote panel: Enchantment and Enlightenment
(20 minute presentations followed by moderated discussion)
Moderated by Joanna Ebenstein
•        David L. Martin, Curious Visions of Modernity: Enchantment, Modernity and the Sacred
•        Simon Werrrett, Fireworks: Pyrotechnic Arts and Sciences in European History

12-1: Lunch

1-2:30 The Secret Life of Objects: The Allure of Objects and the Psychology of Collecting
(20 minute presentations followed by moderated discussion)
Moderated by Ross MacFarlane, Wellcome Library
•        Ross MacFarlane, The Wellcome Library
•        Petra Lange-Berndt, University College London
•        Kate Forde, The Wellcome Collection

2:30-3:00 break

3:00-5:30 Beautiful Death and Incorruptible Bodies: Eternal Life and aestheticized death in medicine and Catholicism
(15 minute presentations followed by moderated discussion)
Moderated by John Troyer, Center for Death and Society, University of Bath
•        Eleanor Crook, Wax artist
•        John Troyer, Center for Death and Society, University of Bath
•        Gemma Angel, PhD Student ad UCL History of Art
•        Anna Maerker, Model Experts: Wax Anatomies and Enlightenment in Florence and Vienna, 1775–1815
•        Simon Chaplin, Wellcome Library
•        Sigrid Sarda, Wax artist
•        William Edwards, The Gordon Museum

And onward and upward in the weeks to come:

You can find out more--and order tickets--for all events, click here.

Image: The "Venerina" or "little Venus," Anatomical Venus by Clemente Susini, 1782, Palazzo Poggi, Bologna; on view as part of the "Ecstatic Raptures and Immaculate Corpses: Visions of Death Made Beautiful in Italy"exhibition opening this Thursday. © Joanna Ebenstein, 2012

The piece is described on the museum website thusly: "The agony of a young woman is represented in her last instant of life as she abandons herself to death voluptuously and completely naked. The thorax and abdomen can be opened, allowing the various parts to be disassembled so as to simulate the act of anatomic dissection."

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Anthropomorphic Mouse Taxidermy Class with Sue Jeiven, London, Last Tuesday Society, September 29-30, 1-5

I am so very very excited to announce that Sue Jeiven's is bringing her wonderful and ubiquitously sold out Observatory "Anthropomorphic Mouse Taxidermy Class" to the London as part of my month-long Morbid Anatomy Presents lineup at The Last Tuesday Society.
There will be two iterations of the class, one on Saturday the 29th and one on Sunday the 30th of September. No former taxidermy experience is required, and you need bring nothing; you will leave with your own taxidermied mouse set in a tableau, and the skills to create your own in the future; past student projects can be seen by clicking here. It must also be mentioned that Sue is a passionate and amazing teacher, and we have had nothing but excellent feedback about her class.
Class size is limited to 15, and, at least in Brooklyn, this class tends to sell out very quickly, so if interested, I suggest you purchase tickets straight away. 
For the Brits among you, you might want to check out this writeup about the Brooklyn iteration of the class in--yes, you guessed it--The Daily Mail, from which the classroom photos above were drawn. You can also watch a brief featurette on Sue and her work in the episode of The Midnight Archive above.
Full details for the class follow; you can purchase tickets by clicking here. Hope very much to see you there!

Anthropomorphic Mouse Taxidermy Class  with Susan Jeiven
Dates: Saturday the 29th September 2012 and Sunday the 30th September 2012 
Cost: £60.00
Time: 1-5
Location: Last Tuesday Society, 11 Mare Street London E8 4RP

Anthropomorphic taxidermy–the practice of mounting and displaying taxidermied animals as if they were humans or engaged in human activities–was a popular art form during the Victorian and Edwardian eras. The best known practitioner of the art form is British taxidermist Walter Potter who displayed his pieces–which included such elaborate tableaux as The Death of Cock Robin, The Kitten Wedding, and The Kitten Tea Party–in his own museum of curiosities.

We invite you to join taxidermist, tattoo artist and educator Susan Jeiven for a beginners class in anthropomorphic taxidermy. All materials–including a mouse for each student–will be provided, and each class member will leave at the end of the day with their own anthropomorphic taxidermied mouse. Students are invited to bring any miniature items with which they might like to dress or decorate their new friend; some props and miniature clothing will also be provided by the teacher. A wide variety of sizes and colors of mice will be available.

No former taxidermy experience is required.

Also, some technical notes:

  • We use NO harsh or dangerous chemicals.
  • Everyone will be provided with gloves.
  • All animals are disease free.
  • Although there will not be a lot of blood or gore, a strong constitution is necessary; taxidermy is not for everyone.
  • All animals were already dead, nothing was killed for this class. All mice used are feeder animals for snakes and lizards and would literally be discarded if not sold.
  • Please do not bring any dead animals with you to the class

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