Handsome Young Doctor

Thanks to Anenta for bringing this exhibition to my attention, it looks well worth a visit.

6 July – 26 August Exhibition – Rannvá Kunoy

Works by Faroese artist Rannvá Kunoy are on show for the first time in London. They form part of a group exhibition titled “Handsome Young Doctor – A show about Trust” and curated by Tom Morton. Rather than focusing on pills, scalpels and other objects from the universe of the doctor, the exhibition questions the idea of ‘Trust’ as a general concept. The London bases artist’s paintings draw on the tradition from high modernism and sci-fi illustration and depict ephemeral figures in a state of coming into being. The fragile state of these figures may question the overall idea about being confident and having faith in the uncertainty of life.

The exhibition is supported by the Representation of the Faroes in London, Arts Council England and Institut Francais. Wednesday-Sunday 12-6 pm

CUBITT Gallery & Studios 8 Angel Mews London N1 9HH Tel. 020 7278 8226 info@cubittartists.org.uk

Changing the Subject

I recently came across the work of poet Carole Satyamurti. This London-based writer does not shy away from difficult subjects. The seriousness of cancer is dealt with with a mixture of wit and courage in Changing the Subject. This collection of her work was published in 1990 and the title refers to a sequence of fourteen poems about a woman cancer patient's experience of discovery, diagnosis and treatment. In Out-Patients, she tells us, the doctor "reads my breasts like Braille, finding the lump I knew was there." And Diagnosis is sensitively handled, "He said/ cancer with a small c/ - the stuff of routine -/ yet his manner showed/ he knew it couldn't be ordinary for me." Satyamurti is a new discovery for me and I look forward to exploring her work further. You can find out more about her and her work here.

Poetic Medication

The nature of this bunch of people I am associated with has painted a grainy picture in society's mind. For they have labelled us nerds, adroit androids and cookie-cutter bookworms; we apparently define our existence by the number of pages of a medical text that we have read (and/or memorised) and of how many accomplishments we have achieved (and how much money we have earned) as we fast-track our journey to Consultancy from that first step into our careers.

Why is it so difficult to equate medical students with the Arts; the anti-Science? Perhaps culture, lack of creativity and the pressures of performing (amongst others) has led many of us to not pursue this as a hobby, but to handle it as an obstacle to what little time we have left for studying. Here in Australia it seems a little more natural to pick up a footy ball and have a match between mates, rather than conjuring paintbrush strokes or rhyming words to ease the stresses of medical school. Lately, blogging has become a formidable phenomenon, engulfing the interest of all genres - medical students included, posing as a platform for a sudden spillage of life stories that allow the common people glimpses into someone else's day-to-day activities. Perhaps this could be the gentle ripple that may someday overtake the stereotypical beliefs that most medical students are devoid of inbuilt empathy, dependent on rehashed formulas that worked well for an OSCE ethics station.

Alfian Sa'at has defied convention, stringent Asian conventions to be exact, in a different way. He has embarked on a career as a successful playwright in his home country Singapore. Storing his stethoscope away for good, he decided to leave the art of medicine to peruse the art of life. His plays have been staged to critical acclaim in countries as far displaced as Sweden. Despite his insistence that his life will not revolve around ward rounds and patient care, little semblances of his experiences as a medical student has somewhat shaped his identity as an artist, evidencing the simple fact that while one can leave Medicine, Medicine will not leave him.

Here is a poem he wrote in medical school. Extracted from his anthology A History of Amnesia, which was published when he was a fourth-year, it describes his feelings in an anatomy class. I hope you will enjoy it as much as I do.

Dissection Class by Alfian Sa'at

Peel the drenched cotton
From his stony face. Some
Wisps will stick to his
Stubble, like love-grass
There is nothing to fear.
Death is its own death mask.

Next, we move the scalpel
Across the chest, gradually
Down the arms, like a zipper.
This, to your untrained eye,
Can be considered beautiful,
Even if it is only skin deep.

Expose the path of the tendons.
Observe the nerves' many detours.
The arm is like yours, these fingers.
Consider this a new instrument:
A microscope working through mirrors.

The muscles ooze sighs under your touch.
The sliced arteries uncover blood clots
Like broken wax crayons.
And bone is bone: the final resistance
Knocking against blade or teeth.

Marvel at the lungs, pyramids of air.
Weigh the liver like a moonrock in your hands.
The hollowed ribcage in a swamp of formalin.
Yes, to hold an organ up like a trophy
Makes this less desecration, more archaeology.

But this is no fossil. No history, only
Biography. Yet even palmistry fails us now;
There is nothing written on
The papyrus of this skin. No echoes
Of past lives, or a sense of deja vu:

Memory entering the head like a knife.
A girl's hands slicing the heart in two.

Heartening new exhibition at the Wellcome

I thoroughly enjoyed visiting the new Wellcome galleries today. There are three exhibition spaces: a temporary space, 'Medicine Man' and 'Medicine Now'. The temporary exhibition space is currently devoted to the heart. Here you can see ancient Egyptian papyrus illustrating separate hieroglyphs for the physical heart and the spiritual one. There's an amazing pair of 17th century anatomical tables -- huge slabs of cedar wood on which is mounted actual venal and arterial material. Galen, da Vinci and Harvey all receive attention in the exhibition.

The middle section of the exhibition is devoted to technology, with explanations of the first heart transplant and a recently-retired heart/lung machine on display. An interesting portion looks at the symbolic power of the heart, including the sacrificial rituals of the Aztecs, and the concept of the 'sacred heart' as the seat of the soul. The art in the exhibition is fascinating, from traditional portraits to more contemporary work. I was particularly drawn to a large-scale work mounted on the wall called 'Le Coeur II' by Annette Messager. It consists of soft toys that have been 'operated on' so that they are reconstructed in new and disturbing ways. They are hung in the shape of a heart. The work sets up a tension between the apparently 'heartless' toys and the emotional resonance that soft toys automatically set up with the overtones of children and illness... It is very affective.

Other interesting objects include a piece of tattooed human skin (somehow more fascinating when it's detached from the rest of the body), a pig's heart stuck with nails and thorns recovered from a chimney in Somerset in the 19th century, and the dried heart of a whale.

There are various points in the gallery where you can listen to heart-themed songs. I like that it is not strictly chronologically arranged. The art and science permeate each other. Poems are displayed on X-rays. I am less sure about the 'porthole' type windows in the gallery that are eye-piercingly bright compared with the dim interior. Who needs to see Euston Road traffic anyway? The exhibition continues till 16 September.

I'll review the other exhibitions in the building soon.

Art in a tent...

...but it's not Tracey Emin. The Royal College of Art's 'Great Exhibition' takes place in a giant marquee in Hyde Park (technically Kensington Gardens) next to the Albert Memorial. This is really to be recommended. I was pleasantly surprised by the heady mix of aesthetically pleasing objects and the ingenuity evident in so many of the projects. There is a fair sprinkling of medicine-related design. I do wish I'd gone round the tent in an anti-clockwise direction because by the time I reached the concentration of medical design (in the industrial design engineering and design interactions section), I had gallery fatigue and didn't give them the attention they deserved. A second visit is in order. Sabine Fakete designed an intelligent knee brace and easily changeable stoma bags. Michael Korn's work also focuses on the patient experience and includes a device to reduce needlestick injuries. I particularly liked Chris Hand's ideas about social sensors (pictured on the right). Susana Soares designed bushy fingernails for collecting DNA (pictured left) as part of her project which looked at what extra organs might prove useful in future.

Congratulations to all the RCA students for such innovative and exciting ideas. The Exhibition continues until 28 June.

'Signal' misses target

I do so wish I could say something more positive about 'Signal', a film directed by Simon Tegala. I went with a friend to see it at the Prince Charles Cinema last week where its screening was accompanied by a lived performance of the score and, somewhat disastrously, a discussion with Dr Kevin Rigley, an immunologist who mentored Tegala.

The film, which was three years in the making but lasts just 15 minutes, is set in the British Library's iconic reading room. A cast of four female characters perform in the space -- some collecting parts of puzzles, others striding about or lying on the desks. A sparkly glimmery 'thing' appears which interacts somehow with the characters. Okay, so I didn't understand what was happening while watching the film, so I eagerly looked forward to being enlightened by the discussion. Rigley, who is badly in need of some science communication training, proceeded to give a totally baffling minilecture on how cancer cells recognise 'self' and 'non-self' which seemed to have absolutely nothing to do with what was depicted in the film.

Tegala, prompted by a question from the audience, did eventually explain which cells the 'characters' were meant to represent. The sparkly thing was the antigen or invader and the actresses were all different types of immune cells. Ideally, Rigley would have explained how these cells work in relation to the metaphor of the Reading Room as an organising system.

Tegala wanted to create a film that did not rely on a didactic explanation of the immune system to 'work' as art. I can sympathise with this -- we don't necessarily need everything spelled out for art to be a transformative experience. The problem is that the immune system already abounds with metaphors -- bioinformation, communication, the military metaphor... I was really looking forward to a new system of metaphor being introduced in the film that avoided these cliches and revealed a provocative and novel gaze. But by making our previous frames of reference irrelevant and providing no explanation for the events on screen, the audience was left baffled. It's a question of expectations: the billing promised 'a surreal exploration' -- but the surreal relies on what we know as 'normal' to make sense as a departure from the norm.

I think the film could still work if Tegala is willing to be more upfront about the symbolism. Librarians wear name badges -- it would be a huge help to know what kinds of cells the actors represent from the outset (all we get is a brief glimpse in the credits). In my opinion the musical soundtrack added little to the film. A commentary giving at least an introduction would enhance the narrative intelligibility. Rigley comes across as badly prepared and patronising ('If there's one thing I want you to understand...'). It's not too difficult to explain the rudiments of the immune system to a lay audience in relation to cells depicted in the film. He let down Tegala on the night.

The whole enterprise was clearly well intentioned and I hope it can be rescued. In its current form, though, it sadly seems somewhat pointless.

The National Gallery in London is about to open an exhibition called 'Dutch Portraits: the age of Rembrandt and Frans Hals'. The reason I'm flagging it up here is that it includes one of the most famous medical portraits of all time: The Anatomy Lesson of Professor Nicolaes Tulp. The odious showman anatomist Gunther von Hagens models himself on Tulp. You can read more about the painting here and here. The exhibition runs from 27 June to 16 September 2007.