Frankensteins Kinder
Museum für Gestaltung, Zurich, Switzerland
The horror-movie title ‘Frankensteins Kinder’ (Frankenstein’s Children) of this group show was apparently not intended to suggest monsters, although you could certainly have taken it this way looking at the work of Inez van Lamsweerde and other artists using computer-manipulated human forms. Although intended to be about the historical relationship between film and medicine, the show clearly succumbed to the spectacular most commonly the image of a crazed male doctor attempting to produce a new creature without involving a women. It is as though society were made up of dominant males who had always dreamed of completely excluding the female sex and reproducing themselves autonomously, armed only with scientific insight. It’s almost a consolation when they can produce nothing better than monsters like Frankenstein’s.
Films involving medicine seem to be inextricably involved with matters of gender. Is a doctor not the true incarnation of male power the god in white? Doctors are frequently depicted as men of unusual intellectual ability who act with skill, intuition and knowledge in dealing with matters of life and death. Instead of devaluing this patriarchal cliché, which is what was needed, curator Jutta Phillips-Krug felt it was enough to present examples of this role-model in its most extreme forms, from old silent film stills down to video tapes from contemporary TV medical series, thus appealing simply to the viewer’s powers of association.
Set up in the middle of the exhibition space were darkened rooms representing lab, operating theatre, ward, in which film sequences relating to the function of each particular space were shown. In the consulting-room, for example, excerpts from pre- and post-war film were screened, dealing with the subject of abortion in other words female distress and male power. The different ways in which abortion was presented in footage from these different eras provides interesting insights into fundamental social developments. Another important strand linking film and medicine could be found in the ‘sex education’ films. In the days of the First World War they were used to advocate sexual hygiene (reflecting syphilis hysteria), while in the 60s they pursued pseudo-emancipatory interests within the context of student rebellion. But beyond all this they were always a good way of pandering to male voyeurism under a cloak of science and sexual enlightenment.
The actual artworks in this exhibition were less successful. In fact it would have been difficult to find an appropriate way for them to complement viewers’ reflections on the relationship of film and medicine. The only possible approach would have been to analyse this relationship somehow. Instead of this, most of the exhibits were photographs taken in hospitals, intended to show what life there is really like, in contrast to the films. A fascinating, though somewhat sensational, sequence by Fridolin Walcher depicted his own difficult foot operation, down to the last graphic detail, in an almost masochistic manner. An oppressive series of black and white photographs by Hans Danuser attempted to capture the presence of death in the hospital, in which he is largely successful. Markus Kaech, in contrast, makes fun of medical photography and information posters using his PC to invent new illnesses. But they seem so overdone and so bizarre that they could scarcely frighten anyone at most they reflect the modern ‘illness’ of playing indiscriminately with the possibilities of digital photography.
The theme of film and medicine is an interesting in itself, but the exhibition does not do justice to the importance of its various aspects: fantasy, patriarchally-coded film, the notion of the Cyborg etc. Even the elaborate, inventive exhibition architecture, with its curved foil walls, could not conceal the faults of the exhibition and the lack of thoroughness with which its themes were treated. All too often a list or a simple sampling of materials seemed to have been preferred to critical observation a process that is hardly likely to provoke thought.
Justin Hoffmann, translated by Michael Robinson
