Date: Thursday, November 4 2004 11:40 am
From: Edward Morman <[log in to unmask]> add to contacts
Subject: Off-site exhibit honoring the Mutter Museum and memorializing Gretchen Worden
Dear Colleagues:
In the wake of the last-minute cancellation of another exhibit, the Temple Gallery of the Tyler School of Art has managed to secure a fascinating installation, "Double Monster," by David Bunn. The Bunn exhibit, very much inspired by the College of Physician's Mütter Museum, will open on November 20 and run through next February.
Everything you need to know about the exhibit (including where to go for further information) is discussed in the text of the Temple Gallery's press release, which is appended to the bottom of this message. Read on . . .
Ed Morman
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NEWS
November 2004
Contact: 215.782.2776
David Bunn, Double Monster at Temple Gallery
David Bunn's project "Double Monster" will be exhibited at Tyler School of Art's Temple Gallery in Philadelphia from November 20, 2004, through February 26, 2005. Conceived while Bunn was an artist in residence at the Mütter Museum of the College of Physicians, Philadelphia, at the invitation of the late Gretchen Worden, the project is one in a decade-long series of works based on obsolete library card catalogs. The Temple Gallery exhibition features many of the pieces Bunn created in 2000 for "Double Monster," which has not been shown previously in Philadelphia.
Bunn's first project with catalogue cards was titled "A Place for Everything and Everything in its Place," created for the new building of the Los Angeles Central Library as a permanent installation in its passenger elevators in 1993. Bunn received the discarded card catalogue in its entirety after the project, and has worked with it since then. He assembles a run of cards by posing a theme, a catalogue subject heading or a title, and collecting all the cards that relate to his query in the order they are found in the catalogue. The titles are typed out in a simple font; they look and read like poems, and are paired with the cards arrayed as they came out of the drawer. The project involves a wide range of subjects, each one foregrounded against a knowing use of language. They elicit understanding not only of the process and effects of categorizing and naming, but also the ineffable absences provided for and covered over by words.
Bunn's project at the Mütter Museum involved the card catalogue of its collection of pathological specimens. Each of its cards names and stands for an object: the skeleton of a giant, the heart of a child, "needles and pins removed from the body of a hysterical female." Bunn paired each of his selected cards from the Mütter with an answering run of cards from his Los Angeles library cache. As he worked with the cards, a number of conceptual issues quickly manifested themselves and were explored in turn, such as the Surrealist notions embedded in the process of his "found poetry" and in the suggestion of the real body in their corps exquis character, for example. The relationship of the part to the whole is evident in both the idea of a library catalogue as well as in the intellectual assembly of the numerous body parts that form the Mütter's collection (not coincidently provoking the idea of Frankenstein's monster). Some of Bunn's themes propose a contrasting double to the catalogue's authority, including "Body Snatching," which alludes not only to history's shadow side in its reference to the illegal practice of grave robbing but also to popular cinema in its conjuring of the horror movie. Bunn's investigation itself was a process of doubling that was manifested in a number of ways: in the literal pairing of the obsolete card catalogues as well as in Bunn's seeking synergies among the objects and themes. Because he could not take away the Mütter's cards (as they were still in the process of being transferred online), Bunn invited an artist with some experience as a medical illustrator, Madena Asbell, to recreate the cards he chose from the Mütter in exactingly detailed drawings. This duplication incorporates another doubling-that of meticulous realism-and suggests the animating effects of focus and attention.
The exhibition is dedicated to the memory of Gretchen Worden, director of the Mütter Museum from 1988 to 2004. Ms. Worden, a graduate of Temple University, worked in various capacities at the Museum since 1975. A recent memorial piece in a local newspaper said, "Worden knew how to honor and respect [the Mutter's] incomparable collection of scientific and medical artifacts while still luring in the crowds to sustain it....She will be sorely missed."
Temple Gallery is supported in part by the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts, the Philadelphia Cultural Fund and the Friends of Temple Gallery.
Temple Gallery, 45 N. 2nd Street, Philadelphia
Gallery Hours: Wednesday - Saturday, 11 a.m. to 6 p.m. Closed the week of Thanksgiving. Special holiday hours from December 15 - January 22. Please call 215.925.7379.
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This e-mail and any attached files are confidential and are intended
solely for the use of the individual or entity to whom they are
addressed.
This communication represents the originators personal views and
opinions, which do not necessarily reflect those of The Royal College of
Surgeons of England.
If you are not the intended recipient, or the person responsible for
delivering the e-mail to the intended recipient, be advised that you
have received this e-mail in error, and that any use, dissemination,
forwarding, printing or copying of this e-mail is strictly prohibited.
http://www.rcseng.ac.uk
Registered Charity Number: 212808
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