RMIT Project Space / Spare Room, 6 - 24 June
RMIT
Project Space
For the Visible Human Bodies project,
Peta Clancy created images using ‘life’ as her drawing
medium. That is, the figurations of the human body were drawn
using living bacteria, which was delicately introduced onto a
ground of nutrient agar. The artist photographed the bacterial
growth as it became visible after incubation, and then as it slowly
subsided in each Petri dish. Clearly, this work can be described
as a contribution to that contemporary ‘biological art’
which is ‘resolutely engaged in the manipulation of life
forms’. 1
Clancy’s specialised method was made possible through a
residency at the Cell and Gene Therapy laboratory at Melbourne’s
Murdoch Childrens Research Institute, where living bacteria are
used for the controlled production and modification of DNA. By
observing, adopting, and documenting an experimental procedure
that is focal in current genetic research, the artist subjects
this procedure to a kind of aesthetic scrutiny. Yet because Clancy’s
‘manipulation’ is premised on the activity of figure
drawing, each image also tests the relevance of this highly traditional
artistic practice to the twenty-first century laboratory environment.
Throughout the history of academic art, naturalistic figure drawing
has featured as a principle and basis for praiseworthiness; it
has been inseparable from prescribed models for imitation. In
the Italian Renaissance, figure drawing was elaborately theorised
as the discipline which could best demonstrate an artist’s
accomplishments of mind, eye, and hand. A corollary to this discipline
was the study of human anatomy, ideally through first-hand experience
of anatomical dissection: the sixteenth-century statutes of ‘the
first formal academy of art’, the Florentine Accademia del
Disegno, required that an annual dissection be held at the hospital
of Santa Maria Nuova.2 In the broadest sense, then, Clancy’s
pursuit of figure drawing acknowledges a history of formal alignments
between the realms of medical science and art; between their specialist
activities and spaces.
Academic training in art has emphasised figure drawing as a strategy
for visualising the correlation of anatomical layers to the functional
‘whole’ body. This conceptual heritage, or convention,
informs Clancy’s ‘new life drawings’, which
literally—though precariously—return an impression
of the exterior body to the microcosm in each Petri dish. As such,
Clancy’s work bears witness to a topical anxiety about the
increasing abstraction of elements of the biological body for
the purposes of gene therapy research, and medical innovation.
They gleam from their lightboxes, but these drawings ‘reveal’
nothing of an interior architecture of bones, muscles, or veins.
The outline of the bodies does, however, suggest a classicising
aesthetic; in one case, the model of the classical, limbless fragment.
By their dramatic contours and colours, the bacteria drawings
call to mind precious cameos after the antique, which extreme
magnification shows suddenly imperfect. Their thin layers are
blistering, dispersing, perishable. Confronting the viewer with
the laboratory ‘stuff’ that is serving to investigate
our biological future, these images are a provocation to imagine
new strategies for a twenty-first century figure drawing, and
new alternatives to the anatomical paradigm privileged by academic
traditions in art.
Cynthia Troup
Cynthia Troup is a Melbourne-based writer and art-historian, and
a founding member of Aphids (www.aphids.net).
1. Dominique Lestel, ‘The Artistic Manipulation of the Living’,
Art Press, no. 276 (2002), pp. 52–54, (p. 53).
2. Karen-edis Barzman, The Florentine Academy and the Early Modern
State: The Discipline of Disegno (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 2000), p.1; p. 163
The Latent Image: New Life
Drawings is dedicated to the memory of Panos A. Ioannou
