Artist gets smallpox

Help! Does anyone out there have experience of working with guides/intermediaries?

Having lived, breathed and dreamt about my project for the last six months, I am now in the throes of letting go, and it’s proving traumatic.

The installations are in place, and I have tested them on various volunteers, to a positive reaction. But as the exhibition is scheduled to run for 6 months, the plan was to recruit guides who will be the ones who interface with the public – in a sense it is they who will present the work. I recognise that any handover process is fraught.

Perhaps we didn’t allow enough time to train up these guides (two training days over one week), but I did find Day 1 very difficult.

Encouraged by Andrew Bryant (see his comments on my blog of 13/4) to think non-subjectively (to let go of the selfness inherent in the process of becoming a modern subject), I nonetheless find I have strong views on what information I would like the guides to impart to the public (and how they do it). I have realised that I cannot expect from them the same level of knowledge and commitment to the project, and have to try and distil the essence of what I would like them to convey.

It is early days yet, and hopefully by the end of Day 2 of training we will iron out the kinks. But right now I feel that my next project should stand on its own, rather than rely on guides. Maybe an audio guide – without the human factor of re-interpreting coming between artist and audience. Is this an egotistic response?

Am I at a point of completion where I am satisfied the work does what I want? If only…It’s a race against time.

The space is still evolving. We only had electricity connected last week – for the first time I can plug in kit to experiment with projections!

What I stumbled on almost a year ago, was a disused space, an attic of five interconnecting rooms that were almost completely empty. Groping around the semi gloom and cobwebs felt slightly scary, as if I had to make peace with the ghostly presences there.

Now, having filled the emptiness with antiques and bric a brac, and watching health and safety signs and emergency lighting mushroom up, I do sometimes wander what I’ve done, how do the ghosts feel about this invasion?

Andrew Byrant (comment 7/4/09) is interested to know what research and experiments I have done. A lot of reading (biographies of Jenner, A.David Napier’s Age of Immunology), rooting around the museum’s archives (a treasure trove of early 20^th century photographs of smallpox patients) and testing ideas and early edits of text, images, sounds on willing museum staff. I have now started taking volunteers around the attic to see how they react and get their feedback.

Andrew asks how encouraging the viewer to feel the work (a right brain experience) will then lead to a questioning of ethical principles. Thinking about the question made me wonder, is ethical thinking a right brain or left brain activity?

When I was working on this project, I went to see Ari Folman’s film “Waltz with Bashir”. It begins with Folman’s rational question: why don’t I remember anything about fighting in the Lebanon war of 1982? He realises this when his friend talks about being haunted by a recurring nightmare from the war. His own memory is blank. So he begins his journey, talking first to a therapist, who advises him to seek out former comrades. All very left brain and rational. But as the movie unfolds, it begins to take on a more dream like state. Sometimes it’s just details (Folman remembering the scent of patchouli his Israeli commander would put on before a raid so the men could follow his smell). Then Folman himself starts to have recurring dreams. He realises he must have witnessed the infamous massacre at the Sabra and Shatila refugee camp. Finally he remembers watching the Palestinian survivors stream out of the camp. Their faces, he says, their faces had the same look of those holocaust survivors staggering out of Auschwitz.

That moment of empathy, that imaginative leap that enables one to see the other’s point of view…is a right brain experience.

I believe that ethics, the answer to the question “what should we do?”, needs to be informed both by our rational mind as well as our sense of empathy, our sense of common humanity.

Working within this setting, I aim for a quiet revolution rather than art at the cutting edge.

The Edward Jenner Museum is a museum dedicated to the memory of the 18th century country doctor who pioneered the smallpox vaccine and in doing so unwittingly started the science of immunology.

My interest as an artist is in psycho-history: revealing the interplay between psychology and history. Research uncovered an incident in the young Edward Jenner's life, which, for me, goes a long way in explaining this sometimes conflicted man and his work.

For Ghosts in the Attic I have filled three of the attic rooms with objects that recreate a story, standard museum practice.

The artist's touch is in the visceral detail: food in the bowls, medicine in the bottles, chamber pots filled and smells in the air. A jar filled with maggots metamorphosing into flies references the imaginary boys who inhabit this space, as well as alluding to their sense of confinement and impending doom. Video projections and sound mark the transition from waking to dreaming, from conscious to subconscious.

The installation aims for the right side of visitor's brain: where they feel empathy and emotion. So that the emphasis in on experiencing the installation, I asked that no signage is used in the attic (a break from the museum's traditional practice). Tour guides and an accompanying brochure relay the necessary information outside of the attic.

From the museum's perspective, letting an artist loose in the attic (a space left largely untouched for the last 200 years) is a big step into the unknown.

It has helped that the pace has been gradual, and the process collaborative. We developed the funding application together, waited anxiously together, and since the go-ahead have written the exhibition materials together. Consultations have involved staff at all levels, often over coffee and cake, a level of engagement perhaps only possible within a small organisation.

At a recent lecture at University West England, Professor Deanna Petherbridge claimed that installation art is dead; that far from allowing the public to be free to make their own meaning, it is in fact coercive.

Is my intent coercive? The signs are intentionally laid, supported by information provided off-site, but what visitors read into this installation depends on their receptivity, and their point of view.

After the recent MMR controversy, vaccination has, once again, become a divisive subject. From the start, vaccination has caused conflict between the demands of public health and individual freedom. What the exhibition aims to do is to encourage a dialogue between these two camps, deepening it by providing a historical context.

And what I hope to do is to get people to question how they judge the ethics of medical procedures – whether they see it as relative (to the social mores of the time) or absolute.

To be honest, to get people to think about ethics at all, rather than "leaving it to the experts", will be enough.