More September happenings

Friday, September 18; Thursday, September 24; Tuesday, September 29




"On Clouds" Exhibition at Observatory

with prints and photographs by James Walsh in the gallery, and an evening program of projections, performances, poetry, and other events by various artists throughout the run of the show.

Friday, September 18 through Sunday, November 15, 2009
Opening: Friday, September 18, 7-10

Th 9/26 Joshua Beckman on clouds. Two seatings, 8 and 9pm
Tu 9/29 Klara Hobza on cloud making and Catriona Shaw and Pauline Curnier Jardin on their cloud opera. 8pm
$5 admission to all events

Beginning Sunday, September 27 we will have regular gallery hours -
3-6 Thursday and Friday
12-6 Saturday and Sunday

Clouds have long been the object of scientific study and artistic depiction. Beginning in the early nineteenth century, the emerging science of meteorology allowed the fleeting and apparently formless clouds to be closely observed, categorized, and recorded. At this same time, in England and Germany, painters and poets also began to look more intently at clouds. While insisting on artifice and inspiration over mere recording, they increasingly sought to give their work a sense of greater realism and emotional power by focusing on the careful observation and accurate depiction of the natural world. The worlds of science and art were much closer then, with artists and scientists meeting in society and following each others’ work, and this allowed a shared culture to develop. At its best, detached observation was allied with emotional projection, and imagination was grounded and enriched by careful, systematic recording, all in the service of what they called natural philosophy and we would call natural history.

In this exhibition, James Walsh will present three bodies of work that trace this blending of science and art in the depiction of clouds from the early 1800s to the early 1900s.

Saturday, September 26



Monthly Jazz-Age dance club Wit's End this month features music by the Brian Newman Trio and a Charleston dance lesson by Neal Groothius and Jeri Lynn Astra.

Antik/Marion's at 356 Bowery
The last Saturday of every month at 8:30
$10 at the door

July Observatory events

This week:

Antique Science

Date: Friday, July 10
Time: 7:30
Admission: $3.00

An evening of unexpected and obscure nature films. Each short film will be introduced by Jessica Oreck, director of Beetle Queen Conquers Tokyo, a beautiful documentary on insect collecting in Japan.

The evening will feature the trailer for Oreck’s fascinating film, as well as short films by Jean Painleve, the great french nature documentarian of early avant-garde documentaries on everything from crystals to seahorses to vampire bats.

Then we’ll have a look at The Cameraman’s Revenge, a silent stop-motion film from 1912 by the Polish animator, Wladyslaw Starewicz (1882-1965). The leading players of this short animation are real insects.

Antique Science will also introduce you to a behind-the-scenes film documenting the techniques of Disney’s vintage nature films. The films of insect-life and plant time lapses are beautiful, the early filming techniques awe-inspiring, and the 1950s naturalist couples who made them adorable.

We’ll round the evening off with a outtake reel from one of our favorite nature hosts, plus a few other surprises, time warranting.





Next week:

Layered Orders: Crowley's Thoth Deck and the Tarot

Jesse Bransford

Date: Friday, July 17
Time: 7:30
Admission: Free

UPDATE: The lecture will also be repeated at 9:00 to accommodate demand.

A deck given to his brother by his mother in 1986 sat in Jesse Bransford’s childhood bedroom from the early 90’s until recently, delivering itself into Bransford’s possession at an opportune moment…

The Tarot in general and Aleister Crowley’s Thoth Tarot in particular represent a miasmic confluence of image and thought into a single structure that is both liberating and overwhelming in its scope. In creating the deck, Crowley (in collaboration with painter Lady Frieda Harris) sought to integrate the mythological structures of the major mystical systems of both Western and Eastern occult traditions and to bring them into line with contemporary scientific thinking. The symbolism of the cards blends Kabbalah, Alchemy, Astrology, Egyptian mythology, quantum physics and even the I-Ching in ways that are at the same time clear and utterly confounding.

In an image-soaked personal narration Bransford, whose research-based artwork has delved into many of the territories Crowley sought to unify, will discuss some of the basic concepts of Tarot symbolism, returning to Crowley’s deck as among the most total example of the cards’ syncretism and as the most controversial.

Jesse Bransford is a Brooklyn/Queens-based artist whose work has been exhibited internationally. He received a B.A. from the New School for Social Research, a B.F.A. from Parsons School of Design, both in 1996, and an M.F.A. from Columbia University in 2000. He is currently a Master Teacher with the post of Undergraduate Director at New York University where he has been teaching since 2001, as well as a member of the European Society for the Study of Western Esotericism. His work is represented by Feature Inc. in New York, Kevin Bruk Gallery in Miami, Galerie Schmidt Maczollek in Köln, and Shaheen Modern and Contemporary Art in Cleveland. Images of his work, a complete bio and related articles can be seen at www.sevenseven.com/, a website he has continuously maintained since 1997.

Both events are at the Observatory event space between the Proteus Gowanus Gallery and Reading Room, the Cabinet Magazine headquarters, and the Morbid Anatomy Library at 543 Union St. in Brooklyn.

Two upcoming Observatory events

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TONIGHT:

Cuerpo Presente: Mourning and Cultural Representations of Death in Mexico, Featuring a Collection of Postmortem Photographs from Rural Mexico

Salvador Olguin

Date: Friday June 26th
Time: 7:30 PM
Admission:Free

The main purpose of this event is to present a series of postmortem photographs taken between the 1930’s and the 1950’s, when the tradition of celebrating a person’s departure with a last picture was very alive in small towns and villages in Mexico. A brief journey through some of Mexico’s cultural and artistic ways of celebrating death will provide the frame and background for a better understanding of these images.

Bio: Salvador Olguin holds a MA in Humanistic Studies, and is currently performing research on the subject of the body and its representations at New York University. He is primarily interested in studying cultural artifacts that depict the body in non-normative, unusual ways. He was born in Monterrey, Mexico and currently resides in Brooklyn.





Thursday:

Bodies Embalmed by Us NEVER TURN BLACK!: A Brief History of the Hyperstimulated Human Corpse.

John Troyer, Ph.D., Centre for Death and Society, University of Bath

Date: Thursday July 2nd
Time: 7:30 PM
Admission: Free

In October 1902, Dr. Carl Lewis Barnes and his brother Thornton H. Barnes, both instructors at the Chicago College of Embalming, created a large exhibition of embalmed corpses and body parts for the National Funeral Directors Association in Milwaukee, WI. The Barnes brothers’ exhibit featured human specimens preserved with Bisga Embalming Fluid—a product invented and produced by Dr. Barnes for consumer use by other embalmers. The centerpiece of the exhibit was the Bisga Man, an embalmed male corpse sitting upright in a chair with one leg crossed over the other, wearing a fashionable suit.

In early twentieth century America, the Bisga Man represented the perfect nexus of mid to late nineteenth century preservation technologies that were to radically redefine the organic existence of the human corpse. Such preservation technologies represent a series of overlapping choices, embalming chemicals, apparatus, and funeral practices all intent on keeping the dead body looking ‘‘properly’’ human. Yet these external forces acting on the human corpse do much more than alter the chemical physiology of the dead body to suspend decomposition: through these forces, the concept of human death itself is simultaneously being altered.

Troyer’s talk analyses and critiques how the modern human corpse became an invented and manufactured consumer product through the industrialization of the dead body in mid nineteenth century America. More specifically, this talk illustrates how the modern human corpse is an invention of specific mid nineteenth century embalming and photographic technologies that seemingly stopped the visible effects of death as they were seen by the general public.

Bio: John Troyer is the Death and Dying Practices Associate at the Centre for Death and Society in the University of Bath, England. He received his doctorate from the University of Minnesota in Comparative Studies in Discourse and Society in May 2006. His Ph.D. dissertation, entitled “Technologies of the Human Corpse, ” was awarded the University of Minnesota’s 2006 Best Dissertation Award in the Arts and Humanities. From 2007-2008 he was a Visiting Assistant Professor in the Department of Comparative Studies at The Ohio State University teaching the cultural studies of science and technology. Within the field of Death Studies, John focuses on delineating and defining the concept of the dead human subject. His research on death and dying, coupled with a cultural studies approach to understanding the global history of science and technology, brings new life to the Centre for Death and Society. His first book, shockingly titled Technologies of the Human Corpse, will appear in 2010. His father is a funeral director.

Both events are at the Observatory event space between the Proteus Gowanus Gallery and Reading Room, the Cabinet Magazine headquarters, and the Morbid Anatomy Library at 543 Union St. in Brooklyn.

Tonight at Observatory

I'm skipping work for this. Tonight at 7:00, Observatory is hosting its first lecture event: a talk by University of Hawaii at Manoa professor Kathryn Hoffmann entitled "Reveries of Sleeping Beauty: Slumber and Death in Anatomical Museums, Fairground Shows, and Art".





This illustrated talk will follow the paths of sleeping beauties: lovely young women who lie on silk sheeted beds in glass cases in anatomical museums and fairground shows, who recline on sofas in Belgian train stations, and sometimes in the middle of streets. Often the women were nude. Sometimes they were adorned with a piece of jewelry or a bow, and sometimes they wore white dresses. One breathed gently in a glass case on a fairground verandah for nearly a century. Others lay quietly in caskets under flowers. Some were wax, some were real, some were dead, and some merely pretended to be dead. Sometimes, in the imagination of artists like the surrealist Paul Delvaux, they got up and walked about; pretty somnambulists wandering through natural history museums, arcades and streets, through modern cities and ancient Alexandria, Ephesus, and Rhodes.

Using photographs, posters, advertisements, and paintings, the talk will follow models known as “Anatomical Venuses” through one of the great wax anatomical museums of the world (La Specola in Florence) and an extraordinarily long-lived popular museum that traveled the fairground routes of Europe in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries (Pierre Spitzner’s Great Anatomical and Ethnological Museum). It will take side trips into some of the visual worlds the Venuses drew from or helped inspire, including fairground sleeping beauty acts, morgue shows, mortuary photography, reliquary displays, and art. In the paths of the sleeping beauties, it is clear that death and slumber, pedagogy and entertainment, science and reverie long shared strange borders.

Kathryn A. Hoffmann is the author of books and numerous articles on the body, including “Sleeping Beauties in the Fairground.” She is Professor at the University of Hawaii at Manoa, where she teaches courses on anomalous bodies and the histories of medicine and the fairground. She has received awards for her writing, and lectures frequently for associations, libraries, and museums in the fields of the history of medicine, literature, and art.

Observatory is the new Brooklyn exhibition/event space run by a bunch of my favorite bloggers: Joanna Ebenstein of Morbid Anatomy, Michelle Enemark and Dylan Thuras of Curious Expeditions, Pam Grossman of Phantasmaphile, Herbert Pfostl of Paper Graveyard, and artists G.F. Newland and James Walsh. It's the newest addition to the little neighborhood of galleries that's quickly becoming one of my favorite spots in the city: adjoining Observatory are the Proteus Gowanus gallery, Cabinet Magazine space, and Morbid Anatomy Library, where I stopped in for tea a couple of weeks ago and had the pleasure of browsing the shelves and meeting Joanna, Michelle, and Dylan.

Anyway, tonight's talk looks to be excellent, and if you're in New York, have the evening free, and actually read this in time to do something about it, I strongly recommend you come by! Plus, it's free and there will be wine. Full event info here.

For some related reading, check out Invading Hands, Sleeping Beauties at bioephemera, which discusses a previous lecture given by Dr. Hoffmann.