The Dead Teach the Living

'b o f/3*- 0 ClhiirDSttDDiie Borland the dead teach the living selected works 1990-1999 migros museum fiir gegenwartskunst, Zürich l)e Appel, Amsterdam Fundaçâo de Serralves, Porto (sooDteints Foreword 5 Preface 7 Interior structures by Ian Hunt 12 Tracings 33 Lea rn t o Fa!! by Francis McKee 57 Appendix 121 F o re w o rd “ Small Objects That Save Lives". “The Dead Teach The Living” , “ From Life" are some titles from works hy Christine Borland. It's clear from the outset: this artist does not hide her preoccupation with the great stories of Life and Death. Both on a formal and on a methodological level, Christine Borland's work is almost incomparable to any other existing contemporary art. Although sometimes exe cuted using almost old-fashioned techniques, this body of work is nevertheless extremely fresh, occupying a fitting position in the discourse of late 20th/early 21st cen tury culture. Borland reinvents the “ grands récits", which almost seemed to have been buried. Her œuvre is deeply ingrained with narrative, telling stories about Good and Evil, Life and Death, Guilt and Innocence. Christine Borland explores the context of those dualities and transforms their meaning hy introducing subtle changes and additions. Working with partly scientific methods, collaborating with forensic or medical researchers, she recreates another, almost forgotten, relationship between art and science. It was a great pleasure for our institutions to collaborate so closely on this tour ing show which resulted in three different presentations with very specific atmospheres. In that respect, this hook creates a fourth atmosphere, building on the experiences of the shows. Christine Borland’s work is like an ongoing plot, not heading for definitive answers, but rather accepting the deeply enigmatic relationship between art and truth. Saskia Bos, Stichting De Appel Joâo Fernandes, Museu de Arte Contemporânea de Serralves Rein Wolls, migros museum r> The artist made a suggestion that her works might he grouped under certain headings: “ Anatomy” . “ Monsters” , “ Genetics” , “Traces” , and “ Self-De fence” . It is always worth considering artist's works outwith their mode of fabrication or technique, in order to get at the thought process active in them, and any writer is grateful for a push in the right direction, a hint of the patterns of organisation. But the first three headings looked too definitively like subject headings: interesting subjects, about which we all could all know more, but were they the right place from which to start? “Traces” and “ Self-Defence” seemed truer to the elusive qualities of the work; an elusiveness that persists despite the clarity and calm in the modes of presentation. Self-Defence because it does not explain the threat against which the self feels the need for protection, which remains mysterious and unlocated but nevertheless causes actions such as the burying of guns and the exploration of the abilities of various materials (jewels, cotton wool) to provide protection against attack. The heading “Traces” also seemed to have the requi site complexity, because traces are the remains of something that has definitively changed state or is no longer. And there is a real puzzle for me in Christine Borland’s work, an aesthetic and psy chological puzzle, in her interest in presenting things that come “ after” , that wish to reconstruct or to find out what remains when something has gone or undergone a change of state. I found I wanted to shuffle some of the works that develop from her interest in anatoms under this heading ‘Traces'*, in that it is historical anatomy that many, though not all. have heen working through. Looking up “ anatomy" in the dietionars confirmed a suspicion: it is derived from (»reek words meaning to cut up. (Anatomy does not of course “ mean" cut up: the word defines the science of bodily structure, hut it is nevertheless associated in many of our minds, rightly or wron gly, with the idea of dissection and therefore with traces of things no longer living). I wondered if it would be possible to substitute the far more gen e ral and upbeat "L ife Science" for anatomy, and see how various works looked under that hea ding. But it didn't work. If art is itself a form of knowledge, it should he able to generate some of its own categories, not piggy-hack on existing disciplines or ways of marshalling perception. The categories I ended up with were much more to do with physical touch, projection and with m\ failure to understand what it is that, in certain works, I was looking at. They are categories such as the opposition between organic and inorganic, that do not fully belong to art or science, meta physics or materialism. They reflect my sus picion that we should not too quickly give up to science and medicine the task of interpreting for us the human body and the ways in which the mind complieately inheres in it. H ow ever exciting scientific knowledge is— and il is exciting, although the journalistic flipside of excitement is an ill-defined terror— the imagined, mental con tents of the body must he given their due too, as must the debate about that imagined and actual making and unmaking of sentience within bodies that remain, in important ways, strange to us, as Klaine Scarry's writings have sought to explain. When the imagination opens up the body, smash ed melon pulp. fat. molecular machines, darned blankets, broken crockery, spent bullets, saw dust. money, gems, cotton wool and the stone of melancholy tumble out. The challenge is to recog nize the way in which art can express, refine and even help us to debate human perceptions and concerns— for example our fantasied understan dings of our bodies, how fantasy makes and unmakes them— while also learning from scienti fic materialism, and when appropriate or possible, enabling broader discussion of its implications and practice. The needs of the for mer are perhaps less well recognised than the latter. The space for fantasy is something that also needs to survive, and part of what it needs to survive is a good-natured scepticism about the ability of scientific knowledge to provide an ex haustive account: something I thought applied to the categories I might need in order to consider certain of Christines works that had particularly struck me. (Ian Hunt) Interior stryetures by Ian Hunt I - TTIhe o rga n ic aondi Mu© imiorganiic A first encounter with the hones of Christine Borland’s “ Bison-Bison” has an immedi ate shock of fascination that the subsequent explanation of the process used in its making and unmaking cannot quite take away. Bone is revealed as possessing pale but attractively luminous colour: blue-grey, dusty ochre, pink, chalky white. The colour is striking in those bones which appear to be crumbling apart, like wood embers after a fire; and the powdery pale blue of the surface of the trestle table on which they are laid is calculated to show off these colours. They are named by the label as the vertebrae, and are laid out in order. Other bones, the ribs, are displayed on lower tables, which make a cross shape with the first. They are a more uniform and darkei shade of yellow and have developed a sheen that is slightly unpleasant; they resemble the things s o m e times given to dogs to chew. These bones could clearly withstand being bandied, unlike the vertebrae. They are all strangely contorted into loops or coiled. 1 low the bones could have become flexible— they are secured in their bends and loops by silver w ires is not fully explained. “ Bison-Bison” ; the familiar name doubled in the Latin classification pro\ ides no clues. Although the beast is, for Europeans, an exotic species, and its bones impressive in size, the mystery displayed is a chemical one which could as easily be demonstrated with the bones of a cow or a horse. What we are looking at is bone that lias been sub jected to calcination— heating— which has removed the organic compounds, leaving the friable, chalky remainder (principally calcium phosphate). And at bone subject to anoth er process which has successfully dissolved the mineral compounds through immersion in a weak mineral acid. This leaves the organic remainder, ossein, the substance which determines the resiliency and tenacity of bone. Immediately after the experiment the bones thus treated are flexible and can be twisted into knots. I he puzzlement does not quite end when the recipe from Gray’s Anatomy that inspired the work is produced. Can the “animal, organic” part of bone really be so easily separated from the "mineral, inor ganic” part? That is the language the 1930 edition uses, and it reminds us of the first question of the game of twenty questions: “ animal, vegetable or mineral ? . Substances really are either organic or inorganic. The distinction is an absolute one, which all of us with a little thought could elaborate. But having drawn the line, do we not still want to cross il? Would we hesitate for a moment over chalk, deposit ed from the bodies of sea creatures— is it purely a mineral? Or bone china, famed for its translucence, one ingredient of which is indeed bone ash? (It is a substance used, following the classic Spode recipe, to make two works: “ English Family China” — fami ly groups represented by skulls moulded and glazed in blue-and-white patterns— and “ 5 Set Conversation Pieces” , in which bone china pelves and foetal skulls are shown in various positions for labour.) When organic material is no longer part of a living struc ture it enters a state of limbo hard to define.

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